The other stigmatizes it as a wholly untrustworthy forgery, and calls attention to numberless mistakes, confusions, misconceptions, and misrepresentations of events, which place its genuineness beyond the pale of possibility.

After a careful consideration of Scheffer's, Fanfani's, Gino Capponi's, and Isidoro del Lungo's arguments, it seems to me clearly established that the Chronicle of Dino Compagni can no longer be regarded as a perfectly genuine document of fourteenth-century literature.

In the form in which we now possess it, we are rather obliged to regard it as a _rifacimento_ of some authentic history, compiled during the course of the fifteenth century in a prose which bears traces of the post-Boccaccian style of composition.[1] Yet the authority of Dino Compagni has long been such, and such is still the literary value of the monograph which bears his name, that it would be impertinent to dismiss the 'Chronicle' unceremoniously as a mere fiction.

I propose, therefore, first to give an account of the book on its professed merits, and then to discuss, as briefly as I can, the question of its authenticity.
[1] The first critic to call Compagni's authenticity in question was Pietro Fanfani, in an article of _Il Pievano Arlotto_, 1858.

The cause was taken up, shortly after this date, by an abler German authority, P.Scheffer-Boichorst.