Taylor, Edgar [Hrsg.]; Austin, Sarah [Hrsg.]: Lays of the minnesingers or German troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Illustr. by specimens of the contemporary lyric poetry of Provence and other parts of Europe ; With histor. and crit. notes, and engravings from the ms. of the minnesingers in the king's library at Paris, and from other sources (London, 1825)

54' ITALY.

arising, and directing men's minds to subjects alien
from the gay institutions and popular feelings which
gave their life and spirit to the Troubadour muse.
The states of the Church were as little congenial with
such pursuits. Italy had none of the romantic gal-
lantry, the ardent enterprise, which, amidst all their
irregularities, roused the genius and passions of the
surrounding nations. It could boast of erudite re-
search, of the classical studies and intricate dialectics
of the philosophic schools of Salernum; but gallantry
and the Gai Saber found no fellowship with the Tri-
vium and Quadrivium. It had no childhood of ro-
mantic poetry, arising as it were naturally from its
institutions and society; though it afterwards adopt-
ed the spirit of the new school, mixed with a peculiar
affected and metaphysical turn of thought, which has
given, even to the works of some of the most distin-
guished Italian poets, a coldness and conceit that
speak to the wit more than to the heart. They sang
of love, but as of a principle, a platonic abstraction,
not a tender or glowing feeling ; and all allusions to
sense were banished from what now became the em-
pire of busy thought.

Little can be quoted, that possesses any interest,
from the Italian poets before Petrarch: but to com-
plete the circle of our view, a few specimens may be
produced, more for the sake of elucidating the state of
the language than for the excellence of the matter.