THE TUSCAN BERANGER

NO man since him who first sung of the other world in a tongue previously despised in this, has exercised so powerful an influence on the Italian language as the modern satirist of the Tuscan hills. What Dante effected for the spoken vernacular of his own day, raising it to be the model of classical diction, Giuseppe Giusti did for the rural idiom of his native mountains, rendering it the ideal standard of speech, and this too at the very time when the national aspirations for political unity made some such common standard a necessity for Italy.