Giovanni di Virgilio1; Giovanni Quirino2; and Francesco Stabili3, who is better known by the appellation of Cecco d'Ascoli; most of them either honestly declared their sense of his superiority, or betrayed it by their vain endeavours to detract from the estimation in which he was held.

He is said to have attained some excellence in the art of designing; which may easily be believed, when we consider that no poet has afforded more lessons to the statuary and the painter, in the variety of objects which he represents, and in the accuracy and spirit with which they are brought before the eye. Indeed, on one occasion 5, he mentions that he was employed in delineating the figure of an angel, on the first anniversary of Beatrice's death. It is not unlikely that the seed of the Paradiso was thus cast into his mind; and that he was now endeavouring to express by the pencil an idea of celestial beatitude, which could

1 Giovanni di Virgilio addressed two Latin eclogues to Dante, which were answered in similar compositions; and is said to have been his friend and admirer. See Boccaccio, Vita di Dante; and Pelli, p. 137. Dante's poetical genius sometimes breaks through the rudeness of style in his two Latin eclogues.

2 Muratori had seen several sonnets, addressed to Giovanni Quirino by Dante, in a MS. preserved in the Ambrosian library. Della Perfetta Poesia Ital. Ediz. Venezia, 1770, tom. i. lib. i. c. iii. p. 9.

3 For the correction of many errors respecting this writer, see Tiraboschi, Stor. della Lett. Ital. tom. v. lib. ii. cap. ii. § 15, &c. He was burned in 1317. In his Acerba, a poem in sesta rima, he has taken several occasions of venting his spleen against his great contemporary.

4 Besides Filippo Brunelleschi, who, as Vasari tells us, diede molta opera alle cose di Dante, and Michael Angelo, whose Last Judgment is probably the mightiest effort of modern art, as the loss of his sketches on the margin of the Divina Commedia may be regarded as the severest loss the art has sustained; besides these, Andrea Orgagna, Gio. Angelico di Fiesole, Luca Signorelli, Spinello Aretino, Giacomo da Pontormo, and Aurelio Lomi, have been recounted among the many artists who have worked on the same original. See Cancellieri, Osservationi, &c. p. 75. To these we may justly pride ourselves in being able to add the names of Reynolds, Fuseli, and Flaxman. The frescoes by Cornelius in the Villa Massimi at Rome, lately executed, entitle the Germans to a share in this distinction.

5" In quel giorno, nel quale si compieva l'anno, che questa donna era fatta delle cittadine di vita eterna, io mi sedeva in parte, nella quale, ricordandomi di lei, io disegnava uno Angelo sopra certe tavolette, e mentre io il disegnava, volsi gli occhi, &c." Vita Nuova, p. 268.

only be conveyed in its full perfection through the medium of song.

was

As nothing that related to such a man thought unworthy of notice, one of his biographers, who had seen his hand-writing, has recorded that it was of a long and delicate character, and remarkable for neatness and accuracy.

Dante wrote in Latin a Treatise de Monarchiâ, and two books de Vulgari Eloquio2. In the former, he defends the Imperial rights against the pretensions of the Pope, with arguments that are sometimes chimerical, and sometimes sound and conclusive. The latter, which he left unfinished, contains not only much information concerning the progress which the vernacular poetry of Italy had then made, but some reflections on the art itself, that prove him to have entertained large and philosophical principles respecting it.

His Latin style, however, is generally rude and unclassical. It is fortunate that he did not trust to it, as he once intended, for the work by which his name was to be perpetuated. In the use of his own language he was, beyond measure, more successful. The prose of his Vita Nuova and his Convito, although five centuries have intervened since its composition, is probably, to an Italian eye, still devoid neither of freshness nor elegance. In the Vita Nuova, which he appears to have written about his twenty-eighth year, he gives an account of his youthful attachment to Beatrice. It is, according to the taste of those times, somewhat mystical: yet there are some particulars in it, which have not at all the air of a fiction, such as the death of Beatrice's father, Folco Portinari; her relation to the friend whom he esteemed next

1 Leonardo Aretino. A specimen of it was believed to exist when Pelli wrote, about sixty years ago, and perhaps still exists in a MS. preserved in the archives at Gubbio, at the end of which was the sonnet to Busone, said to be in the hand-writing of Dante. Pelli, p. 51.

2 These two were first published in an Italian translation, supposed to be Trissino's, and were not allowed to be genuine, till the Latin original was published at Paris in 1577. Tiraboschi. A copy, written in the fourteenth century, is said to have been lately found in the public library at Grenoble. See Fraticelli's Opere minori di Dante, 12° Fir. 1840, v. 3. pte ii. p. xvi. A collation of this MS. is very de

sirable.

after Guido Cavalcanti; his own attempt to conceal his passion, by a pretended attachment to another lady; and the anguish he felt at the death of his mistress1. He tells us too, that at the time of her decease, he chanced to be composing a canzone in her praise, and that he was interrupted by that event at the. conclusion of the first stanza; a circumstance which we can scarcely suppose to have been a mere invention.

Of the poetry, with which the Vita Nuova is plentifully interspersed, the two sonnets that follow may be taken as a specimen. Near the beginning he relates a marvellous vision, which appeared to him in sleep, soon after his mistress had for the first time addressed her speech to him; and of this dream he thus asks for an interpretation:

To every heart that feels the gentle flame,

To whom this present saying comes in sight,
In that to me their thoughts they may indite,
All health in Love, our lord and master's name.
Now on its way the second quarter came

Of those twelve hours, wherein the stars are bright,
When Love was seen before me, in such might,
As to remember shakes with awe my frame.
Suddenly came he, seeming glad, and keeping
My heart in hand; and in his arms he had
My Lady in a folded garment sleeping:
He waked her; and that heart all burning bade
Her feed upon, in lowly guise and sad:

Then from my view he turn'd; and parted, weeping. To this sonnet, Guido Cavalcanti, amongst others, returned an answer in a composition of the same form; endeavouring to give a happy turn to the dream, by which the mind of the Poet had been so deeply impressed. From the intercourse thus begun, when Dante was eighteen years of age, arose that friendship which terminated only with the death of Guido.

The other sonnet is one that was written after the death of Beatrice :

Ah pilgrims! ye that, haply musing, go,

On aught save that which on your road ye meet,
From land so distant, tell me, I intreat,

Come ye, as by your mien and looks ye show?

1 Beatrice's marriage to Simone de' Bardi, which is collected from a clause in her father's will dated January 15, 1287, would have been a fact too unsentimental to be introduced into the Vita Nuova, and is not, I believe, noticed by any of the early biographers.

Why mourn ye not, as through these gates of woe
Ye wend along our city's midmost street,
Even like those who nothing seem to weet
What chance hath fall'n, why she is grieving so?
If ye to listen but awhile would stay,

Well knows this heart, which inly sigheth sore,
That ye would then pass, weeping on your way.
Oh hear her Beatrice is no more;

And words there are a man of her might say,

Would make a stranger's eye that loss deplore.

In the Convito, or Banquet, which did not follow till some time after his banishment, he explains very much at large the sense of three, out of fourteen, of his canzoni, the remainder of which he had intended to open in the same manner. "The viands at his Banquet," he tells his readers, quaintly enough, "will be set out in fourteen different manners; that is, will consist of fourteen canzoni, the materials of which are love and virtue. Without the present bread, they would not be free from some shade of obscurity, so as to be prized by many less for their usefulness than for their beauty; but the bread will, in the form of the present exposition, be that light, which will bring forth all their colours, and display their true meaning to the view. And if the present work, which is named a Banquet, and I wish may prove so, be handled after a more manly guise than the Vita Nuova, I intend not, therefore, that the former should in any part derogate from the latter, but that the one should be a help to the other: seeing that it is fitting in reason for this to be fervid and impassioned; that, temperate and manly. For it becomes us to act and speak otherwise at one age than at another; since at one age, certain manners are suitable and praise-worthy, which, at another, become disproportionate and blameable." He then apologizes for speaking of himself. I fear the disgrace," says he, "of having been subject to so much passion, as one, reading these canzoni, may conceive me to have been; a disgrace, that is removed by my speaking thus unreservedly of

1 Perticari (Degli Scrittori del trecento, lib. ii. c. v.) speaking of the Convito, observes that Salviati himself has termed it the most ancient and principal of all excellent prose works in Italian. On the other hand, Balbo (Vita di Dante, v. ii. p. 86.) pronounces it to be, on the whole, certainly the lowest among Dante's writings. In this difference of opinion, a foreigner may be permitted to judge for himself.

myself, which shows not passion, but virtue, to have been the moving cause. I intend, moreover, to set forth their true meaning, which some may not perceive, if I declare it not." He next proceeds to give many reasons why his commentary was not written rather in Latin than in Italian; for which, if no excuse be now thought necessary, it must be recollected that the Italian language was then in its infancy, and scarce supposed to possess dignity enough for the purposes of instruction. "The Latin," he allows, "would have explained his canzoni better to foreigners, as to the Germans, the English, and others; but then it must have expounded their sense, without the power of, at the same time, transferring their beauty:" and he soon after tells us, that many noble persons of both sexes were ignorant of the learned language. The best cause, however, which he assigns for this preference, was his natural love of his native tongue, and the desire he felt to exalt it above the Provençal, which by many was said to be the more beautiful and perfect language; and against such of his countrymen as maintained so unpatriotic an opinion he inveighs with much warmth.

In his exposition of the first canzone of the three, he tells his reader, that "the Lady, of whom he was enamoured after his first love, was the most beauteous and honourable daughter of the Emperor of the universe, to whom Pythagoras gave the name of Philosophy:" and he applies the same title to the object of his affections, when he is commenting on the other two.

The purport of his third canzone, which is less mysterious, and, therefore, perhaps more likely to please than the others, is to show that "virtue only is true nobility." Towards the conclusion, after having spoken of virtue itself, much as Pindar would have spoken of it, as being "the gift of God only;" Che solo Iddio all' anima la dona,

he thus describes it as acting throughout the several stages of life.

L'anima, cui adorna, &c.

The soul, that goodness like to this adorns,

Holdeth it not conceal'd;

But, from her first espousal to the frame,

Shows it, till death, reveal'd.