effect of drawing from Dante a spirited vindication of his native tongue. It was probably completed up to the point where the author left it by 1308 or 1309. The exceedingly corrupt text has been revised by the last editor, Dr. Moore, upon the authority of two manuscripts in England.
The literary merits of the Italian language are more fully expounded in another work of Dante's, which, however, he composed in Latin, that his arguments might reach those who would not have condescended to read the vernacular. The De Vulgari Eloquio, originally entitled De Eloquentia Vulgari, or Of the Vulgar Tongue, is shown by historical allusions to have been composed by 1304. Like the Convito it is unfinished, only two books of the four of which it was to have consisted having been written. Dante's conception of the capabilities of his native tongue does him honour, even though he restricts the number of subjects adapted to it, and would deny its use to all but gifted writers. It is a still higher honour to have recommended it more effectually by his example than by his reasonings, which, as was inevitable in his age, frequently rest upon entirely fanciful and visionary data. His account, nevertheless, of the Italian dialects as they existed in his day, and his precepts on the metrical structure of Italian poetry, which he seems not to have then contemplated as capable of existing apart from music, retain a substantial value for all time.
The hopes founded upon the appearance of the Emperor in Italy in 1311 probably induced Dante to publish a work written some years previously, his treatise De Monarchia, embodying the best mediæval conception of the spheres of temporal and spiritual
