Hunt, and the

ut they made no draughts upon the original storehouse of German mediaeval poetry. There was no such reciprocity as yet between England and the Latin countries. French romanticism dates, at the earliest, from Chateaubriand's "Genie du Christianisme" (1802), and hardly made itself felt as a definite force, even in France, before Victor Hugo's "Cromwell" (1828). But in the first quarter of the ninet

gh the romances of Ariosto and Tasso and their English scholar, Spenser. Elizabethan England had been supplied with versions of the "Orlando Furioso" [2] and the "Gierusalemme Liberata," by Harrington and Fairfax-the latter

l his foes, th

whose rash en

hamed his country

f the teeth-mono

from Italy, but not Italy of the Middle Ages, that fructified English poetry in the sixteenth century. Two indeed of gli antichi, "the all Etruscan three," communicated an impulse both earlier and later. Love sonneteering, in emulation of Petrarca, began at Henry VIII.'s court. Chaucer took the substance of "Troilus and Creseyde" and "The Knightes Tale" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and "Teseide"; and Dry

h-century Italy, defied approach. Above all, its profound, austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious liberalism of the

master was o

admire imaginations so stupid and barbarous." A French translation of the "Divine Comedy" had been printed by the Abbé Grangier[7] at Paris in 1596; but Rivarol, whose "Inferno" was published in 1783, was the first Frenchman, says Lowell, to div

ser probably, and Milton certainly, knew their Dante. Milton's sonnet to Henry Lawes mentions Dante's encounter with the musician Casella "in the milder shades of Purgatory." Here and there a reference to the "Divine Comedy" occurs in some seventeenth-century English prose writer like Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor. It is thought that the description of Hell in Sackville's "Mirror for Magistrates" shows an acqu

riginality of invention, and its absurdities often border on sublimity. We are surprised that a poet should write one hundred cantos on hell, paradise, and purgatory. But this prolixity is partly owing to the want of art and method, and is common to all early compositions, in which everything is related circumstantially and without rejection, and not in those general terms which are used by mo

Dante and Milton such as Macaulay afterwards elaborated in his essay on Milton. Goldsmith, who knew nothing of Dante at first hand, wrote of him with the usual patronising ignorance of eighteenth-century criticism as to anything outside of the Greek and Latin classics: "He addressed a barba

eputation of the noblest writers." He refers to the "judicious and spirited summary" of the "Divine Comedy" in Warton, and adds, "We have several versions of the celebrated story of Ugolino; but I believe no entire canto of Dante has hitherto appeared in our language. . . . The author has been solicited to execute an entire translation of Dante, but the extreme inequality of this poet would render such a work a very laborious undertaking; and it appears very doubtful h

go silenzio

s like the whis

. But the first complete translation of the "Comedy" into English was made by Henry Boyd, a clergyman of the Irish Church; the "Inferno" in 1785 (with a specimen from Ariosto); the whole in 1802. Boyd was a quite obscure person, author among other things of a Spenserian poem entitled "The Woodman'

e has been thrown under a deeper shade. That agreeable and volatile nation found in themselves an insuperable aversi

ing the terza rima; and his diction was as wordy and vague as Dante's i

symphony of

ponsive to th

sympathy conv

last for life

ng at the la

by mortal pangs

ues the most current and standard Dante in England, if not in America, where Longfellow naturally challenges precedence. The public was as yet so unprepared to appreciate Dante that Cary's work received little attention until brought into notice by Coleridge; and the translator was deeply chagrined by the indifference, not to say hostility, with which his labours were acknowledged. In the memoir[11] of Cary by his son there is a

tic penetration he indicated the precise position of Dante in mediaeval literature; his poetry is "the link between religion and philosophy"; it is "christianized, but without the further Gothic accession of proper chivalry"; it has that "inwardness which . . . distinguishes all the classic from all the modern poetry." It was perhaps in consequence of Coleridge's praise that Cary's translation went into its second edition in 1819, the year following this lecture course. A third was published in 1831. Italians used to complain that the foreign reader's knowledge of the "Divine

ish blackguard reader as yet understands nothing, Fanny of Rimini. You know that she was born here, and married and slain, from Cary, Boyd, and such people." In his diary, Byron commented scornfully on Frederick Schlegel's assertions that Dante had never been a favourite with his own countrymen; and that his main defect was a want of gentle feelings. "Not a favourite! Why they talk Dante-write Dante-and think and dream Dante at this moment (1821) to an excess which would be ridiculous, but that he deserves it.

none beloved

mi

ic nor in any way an

nullo amato a

r

the book and

the force o

libro, e chi l

"The Prophecy of Dante," an origina

imitati

y of the Soutb'

clamatory, and therein quite the opposite of Dante. It manifests Byron's self-conscious habit of submitting his

fata

he cold partner

for a dowr

ow without repa

on; but it le

ely found nor

exile not a

not well fitted to interpret. In the preface to "The Prophecy," Byron said that he had not seen the terza rima tried

that which his own poem records. In the "Defence of Poetry" he pays a glowing tribute to Dante as the second of epic poets and "the first awakener of entranced Europe." His poetry is the bridge "which unites the modern and the ancient world." Contrary to the prevailing critical tradition, Shelley preferred the "Purgatory" and the "Paradise" to the "Hell." Shelley also employed terza rima in his fragmentary pieces, "Prince Athanase," "

lyre even as

ves are fallin

of thy migh

m both a deep

sadness. Be thou

e thou me, i

, or desire, to translate the whole of the "Divine Comedy" in terza rima. Two specimens of this projected version he gave in "Ugo

most concise. But he blamed him for obscurity, forced and unnatural turns of expression, and barbarous licenses of idiom. The "Paradise" seemed to him tedious, as a whole, and much of the "Purgatory" heavy. Hallam repeated, if he did not originate that nice bit of discernment, that in his "Paradise" Dante uses only three leading ideas-light, music, and motion. Then came Macaulay's essay "Milton," in the Edinburgh for 1825, with the celebrated parallel between the "Divine Comedy" and the "

d be interesting, if it were possible, to count the times that Dante's name occurs in English writings of the eighteenth and then of the nineteenth century; afterwards to do the same with Ariosto and Tasso and compare the results. It would be found that, while the eighteenth century set no very high value on Ariosto and Tasso, it ignored Dante altogether; and that the nineteenth has put aside the superficial mediaevalism of the Renaissance romancers and gone back to the grea

ed Homer ruled

e will ever be popular, in Shakspere's way; and yet it is far gone when the

of the century. It is not until the time of the Rossettis in England and of Longfellow and Dr. Parsons in America that a

couplet with the frequent variation of the triplet and the alexandrine. The poem is not at all Dantesque in its lax and fluent sweetness, and in that colloquial, familiar manner which is constant in all Hunt's writing, both prose and verse; reminding one, at its best, of Chaucer, who was, indeed, one of his favourite masters. Hunt softens the ferocity of the tale as given by Boccaccio, according to whom the husband Giovanni Malatesta was a cripple, and killed t

tling green fo

e its author spent two years for a libel on the Prince Regent. Byron used to visit him there and bring him books bearing on Francesca's history. Hunt brought into the piece romantic stuff from various sources, including a summary of

hou wert the c

e with banner

the most bea

me in press

ful man thou

his friend put

the most mee

mong ladies

till, for all t

that ever stru

n many other particulars he enfeebles, dandifies, and sentimentalises Dante's fierce, abrupt tra

, lightly yet

ed t

d

nest things i

oman in a

resistibly suggest

tt, the professor of poetry, who expressed a hope that the youthful bard might be inspired by "the muse of Warton," whom Hunt had never read. There had fallen in Hunt's way when he was a young man, Bell's edition of the poets, which included Chaucer and Spenser. "The omission of these in Cooke's edition," he says, "was as unpoetical a sign of the times as the present familiarity with their names is the reverse. It was thought a mark of good sense; as if good sense, in matters of literature, did not consist as much in knowing what was poetical poetry, as brilliant wit." Of his "Feast of the Poets" (1814) he writes:[21] "I offended all the critics of the old or French school, by objecting to the monotony of Pope's versification, and all the critics of the new or German school by laughing at Wordsworth." In the preface to his collected poems [1832] occurs the following interesting testimony to the recentness of the new criticism. "So long does fashion succeed in palming its petty instincts upon the world for those of a nation and of nature, that it is only of late years that the French have ceased to think some of the most affecting passages in Shakespeare ridiculous. . . . Yet the English themselves, no great while since, half blushed at these criticisms, and were

he authors." Like our own romanticist poet Longfellow, who rediscovered Europe for America, Leigh Hunt was a sympathetic and interpretative rather than a creative genius; and like Longfellow, an admirable translator. Among his collected poems are a number of elegant and spirited versions from various mediaeval literatures. "The Gentle Armour" is a playful adaptation of a French fabliau "Les Trois Chevaliers et la Chemise," which tells of a knight whose hard

positum in t

which utters, with extraordinary power, the ascetic thought of the Middle Age, dw

al, and creative style-a style which may be said to write things instead of words." Hunt's introduction is a fine piece of critical work. His alert, sparkling, and nimble intellect-somewhat lacking in concentration and seriousness-but sensitive above all things to the picturesque, was

eoples wit

of many a g

perament quite the opposite of his, had spoken a very different word touching this cruel scorn-this saeva indignatio of Dante's. Carlyle, like Hunt, discovered intensity to be the prevailing character of Dante's genius, emblemed by the pinnacle of the city of Dis; that "red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom." Hunt, the Universalist, said of Dante, "when he is sweet-natured once he is bitter a hundred times." "Infinite pity," says Carlyle, the Calvinist, "yet also infinite rigour of law, it is so nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that she was made. Wha

guage, but strong for that very reason in first impulses, and in putting down all that is felt. . . . The manner in which some of the hoary saints in these pictures pore over their books and carry their decrepit old age, full of a bent and absorbed feebleness-the set limbs of the warriors on horseback-the sidelong unequivocal looks of some of the ladies playing on harps and conscious of their ornaments-the people of fashion seated in rows, with Time coming up unawares to destroy them-the other rows of elders and doctors of the Church, forming part of the array of heaven-the uplifted hand of Christ denouncing the wicked at the day of judgment-the daring satires occasionally introduced against monks and nuns-the profusion of attitudes, expressions, incidents, broad draperies, ornaments of all sorts, visions, mountains, ghastly looki

orld of lovely images ready to his hand, in the poetry of Spenser, Chaucer, and Ariosto, he found another such world. Arcadia and Faeryland-"the realms of gold"-he rediscovered them both for himself, and he struck into the paths that wound through their enchanted thickets with the ardour of an explorer. This was the very mood of the Renaissance-this genial heat which fuses together the pagan and the Ch

eigh Hunt's cottage near Hampstead, which contains his literary declaration of faith. After speaking of the beauty that fills the universe, and of the office of Imagination

s be forgotten

foppery an

llo blush for

t wise who coul

ith a puling i

about upon a

Pegasus. Ah,

eaven blew, th

waves-ye felt

ernal bosom,

ht collected

recious. Beau

ot awake? But

knew not of-w

lined out wit

le: so that ye

ooth, inlay an

certain wands

tallied. Easy

ndicraftsmen

ll-fated, i

the bright Lyr

now it,-no, t

or decrepit

t flimsy mottoe

of one

Cowper, by Wordsworth, by Coleridge. But Keats, with his instinct for beauty, pierces to the core of the matter. It was b

getting th

hat it shoul

res and lift the

mirably summed up the conceptions of the first half of the present century with regard to classical poetry." [25] The passage was still fresh when Byron, in the letter to Disraeli already quoted[26] (March 15th, 1820), held it up to scorn as the opinion of "a young person learning to write poetry and beginning by teaching the art. . . . The writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six or seven new schools, in which he has learned to write such lines and such sentimen

is said to have been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was reforming his style upon the more classical models of the language," Keats made a study of Dryden's versification before writing "Lamia"; but had he lived to the age of Methusaleh, he would no

ver breathe i

man speak out lou

in as good stead as Landor's scholarship. In such work as "Hyperion" and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" he mediates between the ancient and the modern spirit, from which Landor's clear-cut marbles stand aloof in chill remoteness. As concerns his equipment, Keats stands related to Scott in rom

rpets rose along

not carpets covered the floors in the Middle Ages. In th

led 'La Belle Da

in a note in an edition of Chaucer, pleased his fancy and suggested his ballad,[28] of the same name, which has nothing in common with Chartier's poem. The la

ed instinctively away from northern to southern Gothic; from rough border minstrelsy to the mythology and romance of the races that dwelt about the midland sea. Keats' sensuous nature longed for "a beaker full of the warm South." "I have tropical blood in my veins," wrote Hunt, deprecating "the criticism of a Northern climate" as applied to his "Story of Rimini." Keats' death may be said to have come to him from Scotland, not only by reason of the brutal attacks in Blackwood's-t

ved paly Summ

inter'

ats' word for the true mediaeval-romantic. It is noteworthy that Keats avoided Scott's favourite verse forms. "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is not in the minstrel ballad measure; and when Ke

ecurrent appearances of Spenser in English literary history. It must be confessed that nowadays we do not greatly romp through "The Fa?ry Queene." There even runs a story that a certain professor of literature in an American college, being consulted about Spenser by one of his scholars, exclaimed impatiently, "Oh, damn Spenser!" But it is worth while to have him in the literature, if only as a starter for young poets. Keats' earliest

owels that el

rom a mention of the author in one of his pieces. He also wrote an "Ode to Psyche," which seems, however, to have been inspired by an engraving in Spenser's "Polymetis." Mrs. Tighe was one of the latest and best of the professed imitators of Spenser. Th

warmed jewel

ed from m

earning like

s, midnight, f

" This was the Elizabethan type of heroic couplet, and its extreme instance is seen in William Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" (1659). There is no proof of Keats' alleged indebtedness to Chamberlayne, though he is known to have been familiar with another specimen of the type, William Browne's "Britannia's Pastorals." Hunt also confirmed Keats in the love of Spenser, and introduced him to Ariosto whom he learned to read in the Italian, five or six stanzas at a time. Dante he read in Cary's translation, a copy of which was the only book that he took wit

dead on each sid

black, purga

s, praying in

; and his wea

may ache in icy

r which the latter apologises in the preface to "Rimini," and with which Keats was wont to enrich his diction, as well as with Chattertonian archaisms, Chapmanese compounds, "taffeta phrases

select this subject from so cheerful a writer as Boccaccio. This intensity of love surviving in face of leprosy, torment, decay, and material horrors of all kinds; this passionate clinging of spirit to body, is a mediaeval note, and is repeated in the neo-romantic school which derives from Keats; in Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, O'Shaughnessy, Marzials, and Paine. Think of the

t and fame

should ask forg

syllables th

s of such a pit

all this worm

the yawning

ntleness of

ining of the m

ers over Isabella kissing the dead face, pointing each eyelash, and washing away the loam tha

vile with green

nderness pier

les of romantic and classical handling, though neither is quite a masterpiece in its kind. The treatment in Dryden is cool, unimpassioned, objective-like Boccaccio's, in fact. The story is firmly told, with a masculine energy of verse and language. Sigismonda and Tancred are characters, confronted wills, as in drama, and their

t: search we the

race the princ

find, that when

composed the mou

sneer at priests and another at William III.'s standing army. He makes his heroine's love ignobly sensual. She is a widow, wh

und awaked the

sight no pare

continuously, but with lyrical outbursts, a poignancy of sympathy at the points of highest tragic tensity and a swooning sensibility all through, that sometimes breaks into weakness. There can b

's castle while a revel is going on, penetrates by the aid of her nurse to his lady's bower, and carries her off while all the household are sunk in drunken sleep. All this in a night of wild weather and on St. Agnes' Eve, when, according to popular belief, maidens might see their future husbands in their dreams, on the performance of certain conditions. The resemblance of this poem to "Christabel" at several points, has already been mentioned,[35] and especially in the description of the heroine's chamber. But the differences are even more apparent. Coleridge's art is temperate and suggestive, spiritual, too, with an unequalled power of

angels eve

h

pon their heads

and wings put crosswi

angel; but here the comparison is to Keats' advantage. Not even Coleridge sang more wildly well than the singer of this weird ballad strain, which h

scription of the east oriel of Melrose Abbey by moonlight, and the comparison will illustrate a distinction similar to that already noted between the romanticism of Coleridge and Scott. The latter is here depicting an actual spot, one of the great old border a

hauntin

uffed in youth w

d Rom

romantic escap

And with thee fade away i

ary politics. Courthope[40] quotes a passage from "Endymi

istory! Hence, gi

en-timbered b

porous boso

sels, many a

ed, is left unl

is? What care, t

at Athenian a

ugh striding

th his Maced

Juliet

ow-flowers,-s

fancy from it

l than these:

ars, the swo

lla in the b

brood on wit

eath-day o

e the complaint in "Lamia" of th

ful rainbow once

n of "the lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon" and other like delicacies. In the early fragment "Calidore," the hero-who gets his name from Spenser-does nothing in some hundred and fifty lines but assist two ladies to dismount from their palfreys. To revert, as before, to Ariosto's programme, it was not the arme and audaci imprese which Keats sang

tell a tale

es"; sweet ladies on the worn tops of old battlements; light-footed damsels standing in sixe

I ever tell

flashes from a

ndous hand is

nd go on and finish your charming fragment of 'The Eve of St. Mark,' which stops provokingly just w

estern win

sunset fa

green valleys

lady-like air of the side streets, with doorsteps fresh from the flannel, the doors themselves black, with small brass handles and lion's head or ram's head knockers, seldom disturbed. He speaks of his walks through the cathedral yard and two college-like squares, grassy and shady, dwelling-places of deans and prebendaries, out to St. Cross Meadows with their Gothic tower and Alms Square. Mr. Colvin thinks th

ut it is traceable in Tennyson, in Hood, in the Brownings, and in many others, where his name is by no means wri

le in "Marmion" is addressed. He also translated the "Orlando Furioso"

n 1773-83; of Tasso's "Jerusalem" in 1763; and of Metastasio

, xxxviii. And Cf. vol. i., pp

e supra

minable, the "Purgatorio" doubtful, and the "Paradise" tir

e's opinion, v

Plus Anciennes Traductions Fran?aises de la

ays Kannegie

ate of Polite L

he l'uno spirt

ngeva sì, c

, così com'

me corpo m

rno,"

l. i.,

s "Dante," vol

l Florence! Dan

ried, by the up

Harold,

. 49; and "Purgator

ramo in ramo

a in sal lit

than in literal translation. Cf. Sta

wakes the wish and

l in the "Purgat

ation to L

urteenth line make a couplet, thus breaking

ntos of the "Inferno" was published in 1843: later instalments in 1867 and 1893. Longfellow's version of the "Divine Comedy"

"The

born while he was in priso

raphy," p. 200

ture of him as Harold Sk

rised specimens of the first and second age of art in Italy. I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare; full of romance and the most tender feeling; magnificence of drapery beyond ever

from Pope, Keats furnishes a singl

beauty is a

" See also Sidney Colvin's "Kea

de supr

ident from a letter to Haydon of May,

e whole of the true mediaeval romantic spirit-the spirit which animates the best parts of the Arthurian legend, and of the wild stories which float through mediaeval tale-

for Keats' interest in Chatt

. mentions doubtfully an

s Poem 'The Story of Rimini.'"

an's ed., vol

rd a Critical Method,

er sostentar

a talvolta

ger le ginoc

del non ver

in chi l

io," Canto

de supr

n, Gates, Robertson,

s not strong enough to transmit colored rays, like sunshine (see Colvi

am kissed t

he pavement a

ast Minstrel,"

resting to lear

the Sout

a home

or was in sight of Teignmouth where Keats once spent two months; bu

to a Nig

nt in English Literature

iations." Lewis G. Gates

for Cumberland's poem, on the