[B] Ascanio Condivi's "Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti."




NOTE ON THE HISTORY OF THE SONNET IN ENGLISH LITERATURE


Now that Italy holds such a brilliant place among our Allies during this
the greatest war in the world's history--the war of chivalry (which is
to say moral and spiritual right) against the arrogant might of the
Prussian Octopus,--it is well to remember that it was from Italy the
Sonnet first came into England. The word _sonnet_ in fact, is from the
Italian _sonetto_ (literally "a little sound"), and the _sonetto_ was
originally a short poem recited or sung to the accompaniment of music,
probably the lute or mandolin.

Whether its birth should be attributed to Italy or Sicily,--or to
Provence, the cradle of troubadour poetry,--is a subject on which the
learned may still indulge in pleasant controversies. But in Italy,
towards the end of the thirteenth century, it had already become a
favourite mode of expression; and some forty years later, in a
manuscript treatise on the _Poetica Volgare_ (written in 1332 by a Judge
in Padua), sixteen different forms of sonnet were enumerated as then in
current use.

But despite the continued vogue of the Sonnet, and its association with
the names of such masters as Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Michelangelo in
Italy; Ronsard in France; Camoens in Portugal; Shakespeare, Milton,