the book can have but little historical value when not corroborated.
Still there is a wide gap between inaccuracy and willful fabrication.
Until the best judges of Italian style are agreed that the 'Chronicle'
could not have been written in the second decade of the fourteenth
century, the arguments adduced from an examination of the facts recorded
in it are not strong enough to demonstrate a forgery. There is the
further question of _cui bono?_ which in all problems of literary
forgery must first receive some probable solution. What proof is there
that the vanity or the cupidity of any parties was satisfied by its
production? A book exists in a MS. of about 1450, acquires some notice
in a MS. of 1514, but is not published to the world until 1726.
Supposing it to have been a forgery, the labor of concocting it must
have been enormous. With all its defects, the 'Chronicle' would still
remain a masterpiece of historical research, imagination, sympathy with
bygone modes of feeling, dramatic vigor, and antiquarian command of
language. But who profited by that labor? Not the author of the forgery,
since he was dead or buried more than two centuries before his
fabrication became famous. Not the Compagni family; for there is no
evidence to show that they had piqued themselves upon being the
depositaries of their ancestors masterpiece, nor did they make any
effort, at a period when the printing-press was very active, to give
this jewel of their archives to the public. If it be objected that, on
the hypothesis of genuineness, the MS. of the 'Chronicle' must have been
divulged before the beginning of the sixteenth century, we can adduce
two plausible answers. In the first place, Dino was the partisan of a
conquered cause; and his family had nothing to gain by publishing an
acrimonious political pamphlet during the triumph of his antagonists. In
the second place, MSS. of even greater literary importance disappeared
in the course of the fourteenth century, to be reproduced when their
subjects again excited interest in the literary world. The history of