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Manfredi, Gasparo Gozzi, Varano, opposed the prevailing corruption, which spread most widely in the spoken language. Young men, natives of the dialect states, instead of applying to the study of the written Italian, preferred learning French, as was then the fashion, and many were found, especially in the north, speaking good French, who could not put together ten words of correct Italian. The greater number, however, spoke bad French and worse Italian, or rather no Italian at all, but a mixture of French, dialect, and Italian words. Alfieri, Parini, Foscolo, and other truly national writers living at the close of the 18th century, complain bitterly in their works of the degradation of the language. There were, however, some men of learning and talent who encouraged the corruption. Among these, Bettinelli and Cesarotti were most conspicuous. Both were imbued with the current French literature of the time, and preferred Voltaire's epigrammatic sentences to the more round and sonorous Tuscan period. But this was not all. Bettinelli, a Jesuit, after writing a good work 'On the Revival of Letters in Italy after the Dark Ages,' attempted lighter compositions both in prose and verse, in which he introduced a redundancy of adjectives, a profusion of images, a minuteness of description, which serve but to reveal the sterility of thoughts in the writer's mind. He also assailed Dante and Petrarch, but especially the former, whose powerful and comprehensive genius seems to have excited in him a sort of hatred; he even said that there were hardly three hundred lines good for anything in the whole Divina Commedia. And poor Bettinelli after this had the modesty to propose his own insipid blank verses, those of Frugoni, and some of

Algarotti, (the latter, however, openly disclaimed all part in this transaction,) as models, and had them published under the title of Blank Verse of three excellent Poets.'Bettinelli and Roberti,' says Foscolo, were at the head of the Jesuitic school, who, being fond of novelty, and yet wishing to avoid gallicisms, loaded their compositions with a thousand useless artificial flowers, and indulged in truncated terminations, especially in the plural number. Roberti was compared to a silvered snail, who leaves wherever he passes tracks of tinsel.' At last Cesarotti came, and he, through love of singularity, and in hatred of the supremacy of the Crusca, openly favoured the introduction of gallicisms. Cesarotti was a scholar, imbued with classic lore, and yet he affected to prefer Ossian to Homer; he was well acquainted with the Tuscan and other good writers of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, whose style he has even occasionally imitated, and yet he introduced neologisms and French constructions in his works with greater licentiousness than any who had preceded him. He may be considered as the champion of the Gallic school in the Italian language, as well as of the romantic school in taste and composition. In his philological works, his theory is that of a reasonable liberty in matters of language, but in his own practice he wantonly abused the privilege he claimed. His biographer, Ugoni, justly remarks, that 'an innovator who rises in the midst of a city stationary in literary studies (Cesarotti was a native of Padua, where he studied, and where he afterwards became the professor of the Greek and Hebrew languages) often turns out like the prodigal son of a miser. In both cases the aversion and disgust occasioned by the ex

ample of one vice leads to the adoption of the opposite extreme.'

In order that the Italian student may better understand the difference between what is considered good language in Italy, and the slovenly foreign style which began to prevail in the last century, we will transcribe from an excellent little work of Costa, "On Italian Elocution," a short extract of two versions of Livy, one by a writer of the fourteenth century, a contemporary of Dante, and the other by a north Italian professor of our own age. We will mark in italics the obnoxious words or phrases in the latter, as noted by Costa :

LIVY'S TEXT. Regii quidem juvenes interdum otium conviviis commessationibusque inter se terebant.

Forte potantibus his apud Sextum Tarqui nium, ubi et Collatinus conabat Tarquinius, Egerii filius, incidit de uxoribus mentio. Suam quisque laudare miris modis: inde certamine accenso, Collatinus negat, verbis opus esse; paucis id quidem horis posse sciri quantum ca teris præstet Lucretia sua. Quin, si vigor ju. ventæ inest, conscendimus equos, invisimusque præsentes nostrarum ingenia? Id cuique spectatissimum sit, quod nec opinato viri adventu Occurrerit oculis. Inca. Juerant vino. "Age sane:" omnes. Citatis equis advolant Romam. Quo quum, primis se intendentibus tenebris pervenissent, etc.

OLD TRANSLATION.

I figliuoli del re facevano tra loro festa e solazzo di mangiare e di bere, ed ora nel padig lione dell' uno ora dell' altro.

Una sera essendosi ra

gunati nella tenda di
Sesto Tarquinio, Colla
tino figliuolo di Egerio,
mangiando con loro, elli
cominciarono a parlare
delle loro mogliere; cias-
cuno pregiava la sua
maravigliosamente, onde
gran contenzione e prova
si levò trà loro. Qui non

ha bisogno di parole,
disse Collatino; ín poco
d'ora possiamo sapere
come Lucrezia mia mo-
glie avanzi tutte l'altre
di pregio.

Sagliamo, diss' egli, a
cavallo, e andiamo a

Roma e sappiamo che

opere fanno le nostre
femmine, e quella sia
la più pregiata che in
miglior opera sarà tro-
vata, quando ella non
avrà niente saputo della
venuta di suo marito.

Elli erano caldi di
vino, e senza indugio

montarono a cavallo e an-
darono correndo a Roma,
Quando vi furono giunti,
cominciò a far notte.

MODERN ONE.

La gioventù che appar teneva alla reggia se la passava sovente banchettando, convitando.

Cenando essi per avventura presso Sesto Tarquinio, dove era intervenuto anche Colla

tino Tarquinio, figlio di Egerio, il discorso cadde sulle mogi.

Esaltava

ciascuno la sua in modo maraviglioso. Infiammatasi la disputa Collatino sostiene che non v' ha bisogno di parole, che in breve ora si può sapere di quanto Lugrezia sorpassi tutte l'altre. Siamo giovani e forti, perche

non montiamo a cavallo, e non andiamo noi stessi à riconoscere la condotta di nostre donne? Ri

tenga però ognuno per

fermo e dimostrato ciocchè verrà a cadergli sott' occhio nel non pensato ritoruo del marito.

Eran caldi di vino, e gridan tutti; andiamo; e volano a Roma di pien galoppo: vi giungono sull'imbrunir della sera.

The invasion of Italy by the French in 1796, and its subsequent occupation by them till 1814, sunk the Italian language to the lowest point. It really seemed at one time as if that beautiful idiom was becoming extinct. In the greater part of Italy, absurdly annexed to the French empire, which included Piedmont, Genoa, Parma, Piacenza, Tuscany, and Rome, French was the language of the rulers, of the chief officers and magistrates, the language of the bar, the official language in short, and consequently the forced one of refined society. At last, in March, 1809, a decree of Napoleon allowed the Italian language to be used in Tuscany conjointly with the French in pleading, as well as in legal documents, &c. He also allotted an annual premium to the best work in Italian. But this solitary encouragement had little effect in counteracting the whole tendency of his system. In Lombardy and the Venetian states, which were designated by the highsounding appellation of Kingdom of Italy, Italian was the acknowledged language of government, but French influence and fashion were paramount; French decrees came from the emperor's cabinet; the viceroy was a Frenchman; a French army was constantly stationed in the country; French was the language of ton. The same happened in the kingdom of Naples; there was a French king and queen, a complete French court; French superior officers, civil and military; a French stationary army; and the Neapolitans learned to talk broken French in preference to Italian. Italians in general do not excel in their pronunciation of French, and the Neapolitans are especially awkward in the diphthongs. It was during that epoch of moral servility that the most barbarous neologisms were introduced,

not because Italian words were wanted, but because young men, ignorant of their own language, adopted the words of their French masters, which had become familiar to their ears. Then such words became current as arrangiare for porre sesto, arrivare for accadere, paralizzare for sospendere, vidimare for contrassegnare, disorganizzare for sconcertare, abbonarsi instead of associarsi, debordare for traripare, percezione instead of riscossione, trattamento instead of onorario, and a crowd of chittanze, restanze, ammonti, rinvii, funzionarj, contabilità, burò, borderò, rapporti, redattori, riviste, and the verbs energizzare, rivoluzionare, democratizzare, and such like, with which the newspapers and political pamphlets of the republican period were spangled; and also phrases, such as vengo di dirvi, sul campo, mettersi in rotta, senza ritorno, and a thousand other barbarisms of this sort, the meaning of every one of which could have been rendered by sound and plain Italian words, to be found in almost every author, and in every dictionary. A bastard jargon was thus formed, neither Italian nor French, but which resembled rather the Lingua Franca which is used in the harbours of the Levant and on the coast of Barbary; and it was not only spoken, but written and printed in the public documents, and even in the legislative enactments of the newly-created governments. The minister of the interior of the kingdom of Italy, Count Vaccari, wishing to place some restraint on this abuse, induced a man of letters to compile an index of words commonly used, which are not in the Italian dictionaries,' which was printed at Milan in 1812.

Peace came, and with it the evacuation of Italy by the French. The restored governments, whatever their

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