the most diverse in literature have still their tangents), the Gothic
character, and its good and evil fruits, appeared less in Italy than in
any other part of European Christendom. There was accordingly much less
romance, as that word is commonly understood; or, perhaps, more truly
stated, there was romance instead of chivalry. In Italy, an earlier
imitation of, and a more evident and intentional blending with, the
Latin literature took place than elsewhere. The operation of the feudal
system, too, was incalculably weaker, of that singular chain of
independent interdependents, the principle of which was a confederacy
for the preservation of individual, consistently with general, freedom.
In short, Italy, in the time of Dante, was an afterbirth of eldest
Greece, a renewal or a reflex of the old Italy under its kings and first
Roman consuls, a net-work of free little republics, with the same
domestic feuds, civil wars, and party spirit,--the same vices and
virtues produced on a similarly narrow theatre,--the existing state of
things being, as in all small democracies, under the working and
direction of certain individuals, to whose will even the laws were
swayed;--whilst at the same time the singular spectacle was exhibited
amidst all this confusion of the flourishing of commerce, and the
protection and encouragement of letters and arts. Never was the
commercial spirit so well reconciled to the nobler principles of social
polity as in Florence. It tended there to union and permanence and
elevation,--not as the overbalance of it in England is now doing, to
dislocation, change and moral degradation. The intensest patriotism
reigned in these communities, but confined and attached exclusively to
the small locality of the patriot's birth and residence; whereas in the
true Gothic feudalism, country was nothing but the preservation of
personal independence. But then, on the other hand, as a counterbalance
to these disuniting elements, there was in Dante's Italy, as in Greece,
a much greater uniformity of religion common to all than amongst the