Taylor, Edgar [Editor]; Austin, Sarah [Editor]: 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)

ITALY. 55

There exists among the remains of the Trouba-
dours, a "descort" by Rambaud de Vaqueiras, a Pro-
vencal, written most probably about the year 1200,
which, according to Crescimbeni, exhibits in the first
stanza the Provencal tongue, in the second the Ita-
lian in the Tuscan dialect, in the third Norman-
French, in the fourth Gascon, in the fifth Spanish ; in
the sixth there is what he calls a melange of them all;
that is to say, of the ten lines which it contains, two
are of each of the above five languages, in the same
order as they stand in the preceding stanzas. But
one cannot help entertaining considerable suspicion
of the poet's power to give a faithful specimen of so
many foreign tongues: and when our inquiry is simply
directed to the state of a language, it is not very safe
to rely on the work of one who was probably imper-
fectly acquainted with it except in sound.

Undoubtedly either the Italian of this piece differs
very widely from that which the poets of the country
adopted, or the idiom of the Sicilians of about the
same period had made much greater advances to-
wards perfection, and was much nearer the present
classical language of Italy. After all, however, a
great deal of the early difference between these Ro-
mance or bastard Latin languages, consists more in
the orthography than either the sound or the gram-
mar ; an arbitrary orthography being adopted by each
dialect when it began to be used for literary purposes,