which we have received by hereditary right from our forebears, we will never abandon, save with life itself; for we would rather meet a glorious death with liberty than preserve a wretched life in servitude" 2). The fruits of the victory of Legnano and the peace of Constance were already being lost in the fratricidal conflicts of the Italian cities, when a national consciousness appears vividly in the writings of the grammarian and rhetorician, Buoncompagno da Signa. Thus, we find him writing in 1201: "I do not believe that Italy can be made tributary to any one, unless it come to pass from the malice and envy of Italians; for it is set down in the laws, that Italy is not a province, but the mistress of provinces"—domina provinciarum, the phrase which we meet again (donna di provincie) in the Purgatorio 3).
But it was Dante who first wedded an Italian national idea to the glorious modern vernacular which is the immediate continuation and development of the language of ancient Rome. It is to Dante, as Casini acutely observed, that we owe the discovery, so significant for our own times, that "language is the character and symbol of nationality." In the De Vulgari Eloquentia, he seeks the ideal Italian language, as the character and symbol of the Italian nation, and declares that, although their court in the body is scattered, the Italians "have been united by the gracious light of reason." A keen sense of Italian citizenship is revealed in the first of his political utterances after his exile: the Latin letter where he addresses "the kings of Italy all and several, the senators
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