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Then, on Christ’s book, borne with me still To read from and to pray (I took it, fairest, in a church, The priest being gone away).

—ROSSETTI.

Some of the nearly contemporary Tuscan poets may have belonged to Frederick’s circle, but it will be convenient to treat of them in the next chapter among the precursors of Dante. Of the undoubted Sicilian poets the most remarkable is Jacopo, the notary of Lentino, depreciated by Dante on account of the rusticity of his style, a defect which disappears when he is rendered into another language. Rossetti, speaking from Lentino’s mask, frequently thrills with strokes of true magic, as when he names

the song, Sweet, sweet and long, the song the sirens know.

In some of Lentino’s sonnets also the germs and groundwork of Dante’s lyrical poetry are manifestly to be discovered.

Something should be said here of the lyrical forms used by the Italian poets of the best ages. The principal are the canzone, the sonnet, and the ballata. The canzone admits of several varieties of structure, but usually commences with three unrhymed lines of eleven syllables each, followed by three similar lines rhyming to their predecessors, a seventh of a discretionary number of syllables rhyming to the third and sixth, and five or six lines on a different rhyming system, short or long at the poet’s discretion, yet generally having the last rhyme of the preceding system once repeated. The following stanza from Guido Cavalcanti may serve as an example: