Professor Villari is not only an accomplished scholar of a wide range of culture, but his praise of any work on Italian—­and perhaps especially on Tuscan—­history comes from no “prentice han’.”  His masterly Life of Macchiavelli is as well known in our country as in his own, through the translation of it into English by his gifted wife, Linda Villari, whilom Linda White, and my very valued friend.  All these historical books were written con amore.  The study of bygone Florentines had an interest for me which was quickened by the daily and hourly study of living Florentines.  It was curious to mark in them resemblances of character, temperament, idiosyncrasy, defects, and merits, to those of their forefathers who move and breathe before us in the pages of such old chroniclers as Villani, Segni, Varchi, and the rest, and in sundry fire-graven strophes and lines of their mighty poet.  Dante’s own local and limited characteristics, as distinguished from the universality of his poetic genius, have always seemed to me quintessentially Tuscan.

Of course it is among the lower orders that such traits are chiefly found, and among the lower orders in the country more than those in the towns.  But there is, or was, for I speak of years ago, a considerable conservative pride in their own inherited customs and traditions common to all classes.

Especially this is perceived in the speech of the genuine Florentine.  Quaint proverbs, not always of scrupulous refinement, old-world phrases, local allusions, are stuffed into the conversation of your real citizen or citizeness of Firenze la Gentile as thickly as the beads in the vezzo di corallo on the neck of a contadina.  And above all, the accent—­the soft (not to say slobbering) c and g, and the guttural aspirate which turns casa into hasa and capitale into hapitale, and so forth—­this is cherished with peculiar fondness.  I have heard a young, elegant, and accomplished woman discourse in very choice Italian with the accent of a market-woman, and on being remonstrated with for the use of some very pungent proverbial illustration in her talk, she replied with conviction, “That is the right way to speak Tuscan.  I have nothing to do with what Italians from other provinces may prefer.  But pure, racy Tuscan—­the Tuscan tongue that we have inherited—­is spoken as I speak it—­or ought to be!”

I had gathered together, partly for my own pleasure, and partly in the course of historical researches, a valuable collection of works on Storia Patria, which were sold by me when I gave up my house there.  The reading of Italian, even very crabbed and ancient Italian which might have puzzled more than one “elegant scholar,” became quite easy and familiar to me, but I have never attained a colloquial mastery over the language.  I can talk, to be sure, with the most incorrect fluency, and I can make myself understood—­at all events by Italians, whose quick, sympathetic apprehension of one’s meaning, and courteous readiness to assist a foreigner in any linguistic straits, are deserving of grateful recognition from all of us who, however involuntarily, maltreat their beautiful language.