6. supersensual: 'rising above the bodily senses 15. Beatrice, we learn from Boccaccio, Dante's first biographer, was the daughter of Folco Portinari; it was in May 1274 that Dante first saw her (see below, p. 332); she died sixteen years later. 20. Mr. Theodore Martin (1816-1909) was knighted in 1880 on the completion of his Life of the Prince Consort. 24. The perfect woman, &c.: the last four lines of the short poem beginning, 'She was a phantom of delight,' written in 1804 and published among the Poems of the Imagination in 1807. PAGE 331. 24. spiritualist: not, of course, in its common modern sense of a believer in the appearance of departed spirits, but in the sense of a lover of spiritual rather than material things. PAGE 332. 9. the Vita Nuova (the 'New', or possibly the ‘Young Life ') was probably finished in 1307, when Dante was forty-two and had been married to Gemma Donati for fifteen years. 6 PAGE 333. 3. the 'santo riso': the holy smile', Purg. xxxii. 5. the 'dolce riso': 'the sweet smile', Parad. xxx. 26. PAGE 336. 12. Caught up the whole of love, &c.: from Tennyson, Love and Duty. PAGE 337. 1. passage of the Purgatory: I have not been able to find any such passage; though no doubt to a sufficiently ingenious commentator anything may mean anything. 6 27. sensuous and impassioned': see the Tractate on Education, 6, ‘To which [i. e. rhetoric] Poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate'. 33. says Petrarch: the nearest I can get to this is in the Rer. Mem. Lib., Book II, 'On account of his pride he was somewhat freer in his manners and speech than was acceptable.' says Boccaccio: see § 8 of his Life of Dante; the sentence by nature abstracted', &c., is not a quota- PAGE 338. 5. Can Grande della Scala: Prince of 8. vanished is here a participle agreeing with 20. an assertion of Boccaccio: see Life of Dante, § 12, 24. antinomian : one who disbelieves in the bind- PAGE 339. 2. the passage in the Purgatory: XXX. 24. Lethe: the river of forgetfulness in the under- 25. aliment: food'; the Italian is 'vivanda '. 6 26. scot: 'contribution'; 'scotto' in the Italian. PAGE 340. 10. a 'via non vera': PAGE 341. a way not true'; WALTER BAGEHOT (1826-77) Banker and writer on Political Economy; he was BOSCASTLE. A Cornish fishing-village, four miles from the Norman family of Bottreaux, who built a strong castle here, but the building has disappeared. 8. natural selection: the name given to the theory of the survival of the fittest, which of course does not mean the absolutely best, but those best adapted to survive; who may indeed, when judged by any other standard, be the worst. PAGE 342. 14. your most learned contributor: a series of papers on 'The Provincial History of England' appeared in The Spectator from Sept. to Dec. 1866. The second of these (Sept. 8) dealt with 'The West Country before the Romans'. 18. ethnology: the study of races'; a better word here would be 'anthropology', the study of the physical conformation of man. In that science the greatest importance is attached to the shape of the head; skulls in which the breadth is less than 75 per cent. of the length are called dolichocephalic (longheaded); those in which the skull is more than 80 per cent. of the length are called brachycephalic (shortheaded). Neolithic men, or men of the New Stone Age, were dolichocephalic; they are supposed to have come westwards from Asia, and many traces of them, including a number of skeletons, have been found in Britain. Later-possibly after thousands of years— they were followed by the men of the Bronze Age, who were brachycephalic, and are credited with the building of Stonehenge and other stone circles. All this was many centuries before the Roman invasion of Britain. 29. if the human races were really about then: human remains have been found in Europe which must date from the Glacial Period; this has been variously estimated as occurring fifty or a hundred thousand years ago. PAGE 343. 1. phenomena: appearances of actual things'; there is no implication in the word that the thing perceived is remarkable, though there is a growing tendency among the semi-educated to use it in this sense. 8. gives much to those who have much, &c.: an echo of Matt. xxv. 29, 'For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.' 10. pre-requisites: things required before something can be done. 28. post-modern: the latest period of time recognized by geologists is the Recent or Human Period; as this extends back possibly for 100,000 years, and the whole of it is called Modern, some other term such as post-modern is necessary to mark off the historical from the prehistoric ages. 6 29. drift' in geology is any deposit left on the surface of the earth by the action of air or water; it is especially applied to the rocks and boulder-clay carried south by the ice in the glacial period. PAGE 344. 12. the Strand: this was written before this thoroughfare was widened; it is now in places wider than Regent Street. 14. Temple Bar, which separated the Strand from Fleet Street, was one of the west gates of the city. The arch, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, proved so serious an obstacle to traffic that it was taken down in 1878-9, and removed to Theobald's Park near Enfield. 20. Lilliput: the country where the inhabitants were six inches high. See Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Bk. i. 34. Lloyd's: an association of underwriters formed for the insurance of ships and merchandise. It was called after one Edward Lloyd, the keeper of a coffeehouse in Abchurch Lane, where merchants formerly congregated; the members of Lloyd's now occupy premises in the Royal Exchange. PAGE 345. 10. Lombard Street: the centre of the banking world in the City of London. It was called after the Lombard merchants who settled there in the reign of Henry III. 15. emporia: places where merchandise is collected. 18. Bideford (pronounced 'Biddyford'): a little seaport on the north coast of Devon, formerly of much greater importance than it is to-day. 34. Ellangowan: the home of the Bertrams in Scott's Guy Mannering. Hatterick this should be Hatteraick. 35. ' pinners' head-dresses for women with two long flaps which hung down and were pinned across the breast. PAGE 346. 2. King Arthur: the origin of the Arthurian legend is perhaps to be sought in the old Breton and Welsh ballads, which became transformed into French romances in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. From these Malory derived his Morte d'Arthur in the reign of Edward IV; and this in turn gave Tennyson material for his Idylls of the Kingthe form in which the tale is most popularly known to-day. The glorification of Arthur's character is solely due to Tennyson, who tried to draw him as a perfect man, and succeeded in portraying a perfect prig. The framework of chivalry in which the stories are set is as old as the early romances, and is as grave an anachronism as were the top-boots worn by Achilles on the Elizabethan stage. 12. have not been repaired these thousand years: Tintagel Castle was a residence of the Earls of Cornwall from a date not long after the Norman Conquest; a Lord Mayor of London was imprisoned there in the reign of Richard II, and the building did not cease to be occupied till the beginning of the sixteenth century, since which time it has been rapidly falling into ruin. 19. the people who dwelt near Bedford: shortly before this paper appeared flint implements of the New Stone Age had been found in the valley of the Ouse in Bedfordshire. 21. the long-horned rhinoceros: the Tichorine or Woolly Rhinoceros is known to have inhabited the British Isles in days long before the dawn of history; almost entire carcases of it with the wool still on the hide have been preserved in the frozen soil of Siberia, alongside of the mammoth. 22. literati: [Latin] men of letters ’. 25. nadir: the point of the heavens exactly under |