Obedient, sweet, and full of seemly shame, The person decks with beauty; moulding it In riper manhood, temperate, firm of heart, And, in her elder days, For prudent and just largeness is she known; That wisdom in her staid discourse be shown. Contemplating the end she shall attain; And looketh back; and blesseth the time past. His lyric poems, indeed, generally stand much in need of a comment to explain them; but the difficulty arises rather from the thoughts themselves, than from any imperfection of the language in which those thoughts are conveyed. Yet they abound not only in deep moral reflections, but in touches of tenderness and passion. Some, it has been already intimated, have supposed that Beatrice was only a creature of Dante's imagination; and there can be no question but that he has invested her, in the Divina Commedia, with the attributes of an allegorical being. But who can doubt of her having had a real existence, when she is spoken of in such a strain of passion as in these lines? Quel ch' ella par, quando un poco sorride, Non si può dicer ne tenere a mente, Si è nuovo miracolo e gentile. Mira che quando ride Passa ben di dolcezza ogni altra cosa. Vita Nuova. Canz. XV. The canzone, from which the last couplet is taken, presents a portrait which might well supply a painter with a far more exalted idea of female beauty, than he could form to himself from the celebrated Ode of Anacreon on a similar subject. After a minute description of those parts of her form, which the garments of a modest woman would suffer to be seen, he raises the whole by the superaddition of a moral grace and dignity, such as the Christian religion alone could supply, and such as the pencil of Raphael afterwards aimed to represent. Umile vergognosa e temperata, E sempre a vertù grata, Intra suoi be' costumi un atto regna, I am aware that this canzone is not ascribed to Dante, in the collection of Sonetti e Canzoni printed by the Giunti One or two of the sonnets prove that he could at times condescend to sportiveness and pleasantry. The following to Brunetto, I should conjecture to have been sent with his Vita Nuova, which was written the year before Brunetto died. 1 Master Brunetto, this I send, entreating Ye'll entertain this lass of mine at Easter; You have amongst you many sapient men, I have been posed amid that learned rout. And if they cannot spell her right, why then Another, though on a more serious subject, is yet remarkable for a fancifulness, such as that with which Chaucer, by a few spirited touches, often conveys to us images more striking than others have done by repeated and elaborate efforts of skill. Came Melancholy to my side one day, And said: "I must a little bide with thee:" 66 Away: I will have none of you: make no delay." And on his head a hat of mourning wore; And he rejoin'd: "Sad thought and anguish sore. For purity of diction, the Rime of our author are, I think, on the whole, preferred by Muratori in 1527. Monti, in his Proposta under the word "Induare," remarks that it is quite in the style of Fazio degli Uberti; and adds, that a very rare MS. possessed by Perticari restores it to that writer. On the other hand, Missirini, in a late treatise "On the Love of Dante and on the Portrait of Beatrice," printed at Florence in 1832, makes so little doubt of its being genuine, that he founds on it the chief argument to prove an old picture in his possession to be intended for a representation of Beatrice. See Fraticelli's Opere Minori di Dante, tom. i. p. cciii. 12° Fir. 1834. 1 Fraticelli (Ibid. p. cccii. ccciii.) questions the genuineness of this sonnet, and decides on the spuriousness of that which follows. I do not, in either instance, feel the justness of his reasons. to his Divina Commedia, though that also is allowed to be a model of the pure Tuscan idiom. To this singular production, which has not only stood the test of ages, but given a tone and colour to the poetry of modern Europe, and even animated the genius of Milton and of Michael Angelo, it would be difficult to assign its place according to the received rules of criticism. Some have termed it an epic poem; and others, a satire but it matters little by what name it is called. It suffices that the poem seizes on the heart by its two great holds, terror and pity; detains the fancy by an accurate and lively delineation of the objects it represents; and displays throughout such an originality of conception, as leaves to Homer and Shakspeare alone the power of challenging the pre-eminence or equality1. The fiction, it has : 1 Yet his pretensions to originality have not been wholly unquestioned. Dante, it has been supposed, was more immediately influenced in his choice of a subject by the Vision of Alberico, written in barbarous Latin prose about the beginning of the twelfth century. The incident, which is said to have given birth to this composition, is not a little marvellous. Alberico, the son of noble parents, and born at a castle in the neighbourhood of Alvito in the diocese of Sora, in the year 1101 or soon after, when he had completed his ninth year, was seized with a violent fit of illness, which deprived him of his senses for the space of nine days. During the continuance of this trance, he had a vision, in which he seemed to himself to be carried away by a dove, and conducted by St. Peter, in company with two angels, through Purgatory and Hell, to survey the torments of sinners; the saint giving him information, as they proceeded, respecting what he saw after which they were transported together through the seven heavens, and taken up into Paradise, to behold the glory of the blessed. As soon as he came to himself again, he was permitted to make profession of a religious life in the monastery of Monte Casino. As the account he gave of his vision was strangely altered in the reports that went abroad of it, Girardo the abbot employed one of the monks to take down a relation of it, dictated by the mouth of Alberico himself. Senioretto, who was chosen abbot in 1127, not contented with this narrative, although it seemed to have every chance of being authentic, ordered Alberico to revise and correct it, which he accordingly did with the assistance of Pietro Diacono, who was his associate in the monastery, and a few years younger than himself; and whose testimony to his extreme and perpetual self-mortification, and to a certain abstractedness of demeanour, which showed him to converse with other thoughts than those of this life, is still on record. The time of Alberico's death is not known; but it is conjectured that he reached to a good old age. His Vision, with a preface by the first editor Guido, and preceded by a letter from Alberico himself, is preserved in a MS. been remarked1, is admirable, and the work of an inventive talent truly great. It comprises a numbered 257 in the archives of the monastery, which contains the works of Pietro Diacono, and which was written between the years 1159 and 1181. The probability of our Poet's having been indebted to it, was first remarked either by Giovanni Bottari in a letter inserted in the Deca di Simboli, and printed at Rome in 1753; or, as F. Cancellieri conjectures, in the preceding year by Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi. In 1801, extracts from Alberico's Vision were laid before the public in a quarto pamphlet, printed at Rome with the title of Lettera di Eustazio Dicearcheo ad Angelio Sidicino, under which appellations the writer, Giustino di Costanzo, concealed his own name and that of his friend Luigi Anton. Sompano; and the whole has since, in 1814, been edited in the same city by Francesco Cancellieri, who has added to the original an Italian translation. Such parts of it, as bear a marked resemblance to passages in the Divina Commedia, will be found distributed in their proper places throughout the following notes. The reader will in these probably see enough to convince him that our author had read this singular work, although nothing to detract from his claim to originality. Long before the public notice had been directed to this supposed imitation, Malatesta Porta in the Dialogue entitled Rossi, as referred to by Fontanini in his Eloquenza Italiana, had suggested the probability that Dante had taken his plan from an ancient romance, called Guerrino di Durazzo il Meschino. The above-mentioned Bottari, however, adduced reasons for concluding that this book was written originally in Provençal, and not translated into Italian till after the time of our Poet, by one Andrea di Barberino, who embellished it with many images, and particularly with similes, borrowed from the Divina Commedia. Mr. Warton, in one part of his History of English Poetry, (vol. i. s. xviii. p. 463.) has observed, that a poem, entitled Le Voye on le Songe d'Enfer, was written by Raoul de Houdane, about the year 1180; and in another part (vol. ii. s. x. p. 219.) he has attributed the origin of Dante's Poem to that "favourite apologue, the Somnium Scipionis of Cicero, which, in Chaucer's words, treats of heaven and hell And yearth and souls that therein dwell." Assembly of Foules. It is likely that a little research might discover many other sources, from which his invention might with an equal appearance of truth be derived. The method of conveying instruction or entertainment under the form of a vision, in which the living should be made to converse with the dead, was so obvious, that it would be, perhaps, difficult to mention any country in which it had not been employed. It is the scale of magnificence on which this conception was framed, and the wonderful developement of it in all its parts, that may justly entitle our Poet to rank among the few minds, to whom the power of a great creative faculty can be ascribed. 1 Leonardo Aretino, Vita di Dante. description of the heavens and heavenly bodies; a description of men, their deserts and punishments, of supreme happiness and utter misery, and of the middle state between the two extremes: nor, perhaps, was there ever any one who chose a more ample and fertile subject; so as to afford scope for the expression of all his ideas, from the vast multitude of spirits that are introduced speaking on such different topics; who are of so many different countries and ages, and under circumstances of fortune so striking and so diversified; and who succeed, one to another, with such a rapidity as never suffers the attention for an instant to pall. His solicitude, it is true, to define all his images in such a manner as to bring them distinctly within the circle of our vision, and to subject them to the power of the pencil, sometimes renders him little better than grotesque, where Milton has since taught us to expect sublimity. But his faults, in general, were less those of the poet, than of the age in which he lived. For his having adopted the popular creed in all its extravagance, we have no more right to blame him, than we should have to blame Homer because he made use of the heathen deities, or Shakspeare on account of his witches and fairies. The supposed influence of the stars, on the disposition of men at their nativity, was hardly separable from the distribution which he had made of the glorified spirits through the heavenly bodies, as the abodes of bliss suited to their several endowments. And whatever philosophers may think of the matter, it is certainly much better, for the ends of poetry at least, that too much should be believed, rather than less, or even no more than can be proved to be true. Of what he considered the cause of civil and religious liberty, he is on all occasions the zealous and fearless advocate; and of that higher freedom, which is seated in the will, he was an assertor equally strenuous and enlightened. The contemporary of Thomas Aquinas, it is not to be wondered if he has given his poem a tincture of the scholastic theology, which the writings of that extraordinary man had rendered so prevalent, and without which it could not perhaps have been made acceptable to the generality of his readers. The phraseology has been accused of being at times hard and |