Dante puts us at the right point of view for estimating Guido's service. Though he recognized the Sicilians as the first masters of poetic style in Italy, Dante saluted the poet of Bologna as his father[45]:
Quando i' udi' nomar sè stesso il padre Mio, e degli altri miei miglior, che mai Rime d'amor usâr dolci e leggiadre.
On the authority of this sentence we hail in Guido the founder of the new and specifically national literature of the Italians. If not the master, he was the prophet of that _dolce stil nuovo_, which freed them from dependence on foreign traditions, and led, by transmutation, to the miracles of their Renaissance art. He divined that sincere source of inspiration, whereof Dante speaks[46]:
Io mi son un che quando Amore spira, noto; ed a quel modo Ch'ei detta dentro, vo significando.
The happy instinct which led him to use Tuscan, has secured his place upon the roll of poets who may still be read with pleasure. And of this, too, Dante prophesied[47]:
Li dolci detti vostri, Che, quanto durerà l'uso moderno, Faranno cari ancora i loro inchiostri.
Bologna could boast of many minor bards--of the excellent Onesto, of Fabrizio and Ghislieri, _qui doctores fuerunt illustres et vulgarium discretione repleti_.[48] Her erudition was further illustrated by the work of one Guidotto, who composed a treatise on the new vernacular, which he dedicated to King Manfred. Thus both by example and precept, by the testimony of Dante and the fair fame of her own writers, this city makes for us a link between Sicilian and Tuscan literature.
Manfred was slain at Benevento in 1266, and with him expired the prospects of Sicilian poetry. Dante, destined to inaugurate the great age, was born at Florence in 1265. Guido Guinicelli died in 1277, when Dante had completed his twelfth year. From 1249 until 1271, during the whole childhood of Dante, Enzo, King of Sardinia, Manfred's half-brother and Frederick II.'s son, remained a prisoner in the public palace of Bologna. In one of those years of preparation and transition, while the learned stanzas of Guido Guinicelli were preluding the "new sweet style" of Tuscany, this yellow-haired scion of the Suabian princes, the progenitor of the Bentivogli, sent a song forth from his dungeon's _loggie_ to greet the provinces of Italy:--