FRANCE, PROVENCE, NORTH ITALY, AND BRITTANY 143 with least support.1 La mal mariee vengee par ses freres, which Arbaud entitled Clotilda, is more likely to be a derivative of the German cycle of Kudrun ballads than an historical notice of the sorrows of a Merowing princess* The ballads of northern Italy belong to the same group as those of France and Provence: they have the same form, many of the same subjects, and a related language.2 The Maritime Alps are not a linguistic obstacle, and the changes which mark the difference between French and Italian take place so gradually that a traveller would not be able to encounter a fixed frontier in all the distance from the Alps to the Apennines.3 The Franco-Italian ballad area, however, extends only to the limits of Cisalpine Gaul, not on account of the Celtic substratum of the Gauls, but partly for political reasons and partly through opposition to the * lingua toscana'. This tongue—standard literary Italian—is not identical with the speech of any particular place, even of Florence. It has always been, to some extent, a convention of educated men, a 'volgare illustre'; and since the middle years of the thirteenth cen- tury it has been the vehicle of a rich and brilliant literature. This literature, and the whole culture it implies, has enthralled Central Italy, leaving to the dialects a restricted field of peasant improvisa- tions ; it is only in regions linguistically and (at one time) politically remote that original creation in the local speech has found room to develop. The Sicilian dialect in the far south supports a flourish- ing balladry, though even this has been influenced by, or modelled on, the Tuscan literary tradition. In the far north, Piedmont and Lombardy employ vernaculars equidistant from standard French 1 Elveskud 5Ai22iADsB i sharp 24 U8 d/g.fg/a.bc/b.ga/g. 5Ai4BBEsAi4B i sharp 24 Ui6 d./g..fg..b/b..ag..d/g..fg..b/a... 52BAB2i2CiAD i sharp 38 US d/g..(agf)/efga(afgf)/d. C. Colvill 525BE2 34 U8 dgg.g./a.a^../cga. (d..g)/g...g./a...a./£..cg/a... Elveskud 5AD5234B2B i flat 24 U8 (cc)/f.ec/f.gb/