But the essential point was that language, whether spoken or
written, was held to be an object of respect. As long as this feeling
was prevalent, the fanaticism of the purists--their linguistic
congresses and the rest of it--did little harm. Their bad influence was
not felt till much later, when the original power of Italian literature
relaxed and yielded to other and far worse influences. At last it
became possible for the Accademia della Crusca to treat Italian like a
dead language. But this association proved so helpless that it could
not even hinder the invasion of Gallicism in the eighteenth century.
This language--loved, tended, and trained to every use--now served as
the basis of social intercourse. In northern countries, the nobles and
the princes passed their leisure either in solitude, or in hunting,
fighting, drinking, and the like; the burghers in games and bodily
exercises, with a mixture of literary or festive amusements. In Italy
there existed a neutral ground, where people of every origin, if they
had the needful talent and culture, spent their time in conversation
change of jest and earnest. As eating small part of such
entertainments, it not difficult to keep at a distance those who sought
society for these objects. If we are to take the writers of dialogues
literally, the loftiest problems of human existence were not excluded
from the conversation of thinking men, and the production of noble
thoughts was not, as was commonly the case in the North, the work of
solitude, but of society.
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