and paradise, and indulged with the sight and conversation of various persons. It is evident that the sixth book of the Æneis suggested the general outline, and however inferior the modern poet of Italy may be thought to his great prototype, it is with peculiar pleasure we peruse the following lines, which at once shew, that the bard of Mantua, after the long lapse of ages of tasteless ignorance, had found a reader, who could admire and rival his beauties. Art thou Virgil? he asks, on his first presenting himself to his view: Oh degli altri poeti onore, e lume, Vagliami 'l lungo studio, e'l grande amore, Lo bello stile, che m'ha fatto onore.' "The Italians allow, that this work of Dante is not a regular composition; that it abounds with wild and extravagant passages; that his images are often unnatural; that he makes Virgil utter the most absurd remarks; that some whole cantoes cannot be read with patience; that his verses are frequently unsufferably harsh, and his rhymes void of euphony; and, in one word, that his defects, which no man of common judgment will pretend to justify, are not few nor trifling. But, whatever may be the sum of his imperfections or the number of his faults, they are amply compensated, by the highest beauties:-by an imagination of the richest kind; a style, sublime, pathetic, animated; by delineations the most powerfully impressive; a tone of invective withering, irresistible, and indig nant; and by passages of the most exquisite tenderness. The story of Count Ugolino and his children, than which the genius of man never produced a more pathetic picture, would alone prove, that the Muses were returned to the soil of Latium. When it is, besides, considered, that the Italian poetry had hitherto beenmerely an assemblage of rhymed phrases, on love or some moral topic, without being animated by a single spark of genius-our admiration of Dante must be proportionally increased. Inspired, as it were, by him whose volume, he says, he had sought, and whom he calls his master, he rose to the heights of real poesy; spoke of things not within the reach of common minds; poured life into inanimate nature; and all this in a strain of language to which as yet no ear had listened. "Among the various attractions which I have enumerated, and to which may be added the rich colouring with which the poet had the skill to invest all the arts and literature of the age, as they make their appearance in his work, I ought to state that the many living, or at that time well-known characters, whom he brought forward, and whose good and bad deeds he tells without reserve, greatly augmented the interest of his work, and rendered ta feast for the censorious or malevolent." P. 414. Indeed from this crude specimen of criticism we should be very much tempted to believe Mr. Berington had never read Dante, and that, like the bookseller of yore, he spoke of all the books he had in his shop as if he had perused them, when he had only read their several title pages. Seriously, if Mr. Berington knows any thing about Dante, we should be glad to learn how he can have failed to have been deeply struck by various circumstances in the eventful life of the Italian poet, which might have given him the clue to explain to the reader the intention of the poem, and, perhaps, the cause itself which gave him. the first idea of his Inferno; and if he has perused the Divina Commedia, has he felt no curiosity, or has he not been able to explain how genius may be affected by the most turbulent ages? Less admirers than Mr. Berington professes himself to be of the Italian literature, we have been long wishing for a good, impartial, and philosophical account of Dante, and his poem. The Italian commentators are much too diffuse, and through prejudice or fear, or both, they either make him say what he never meant, or do not dare to bring to light and explain those anecdotes which attack their popes, their cardinals, and their superstition. In England we know little or nothing about Dante; and this blank in our literature ought to be filled by a philoso pher, and a man of genius who should be perfectly acquainted with the Italian language, and no less skilful in the history and literature of the age. Mr. Berington has disappointed our hopes; and we trust that such a blank will not be felt much longer. In the mean time, we shall lay before our readers a few remarks, which we think necessary to state, respecting Dante and his poem; and set in a right point of view a few facts which have been mistated by Mr. Berington. "Scarcely had this poem seen the light, when the public mind was seized as if by a charm. Copies were multiplied, and comments written, within the course of a few years. Even chairs, with honourable stipends, were founded in Florence, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, and Piacenza; whence able professors delivered lectures on the Divina Commedia, to an admiring audience. They did not always display its beauties, nor elucidate its obscurities; but, under the mistaken conviction, that it abounded with allegories and mystic meanings, they dwelt too much on these; and thus they often occasioned darkness rather than diffused light." P. 416. We perfectly agree with Mr. Berington in whatever he says with regard to the commentators of Dante. It is too much the case with the whole race of commentators; Dante is but one one instance of this truth. But if Mr. Berington would have taken the trouble to enquire into the life of the Italian poet, he would have found the reason of this obscurity. It was not immediately after "this poem had seen the light" but long after the poet's death, when people had lost the key to its allusions, and no longer understood either the customs of the time or the use of the poem, that the comments on the Commedia began to be written. It was then that its reputation began, and did not cease to spread itself during the period of five hundred years. Having then no longer occasion to fear the consequences of his political tenets, and what is more, no opportunity of revenging themselves; the Florentines gave to the Commedia the epithet of Divina, and as Dante had escaped the pile which they had prepared for him during his life, by way of exchange they cast into it, after his death, a poor and innocent poet, Cecco d'Ascoli, under pretence of magic, but in reality because he had been guilty of high literary treason, in cursing the memory of Dante, whom the Florentines had persecuted, and in criticising his poem by which they had been scandalized, during his life. Dante, indeed, had shocked the prejudices of his age, but his age was a superlatively wretched one. The violences and usurpations of the Popes, the miserable extinction of the royal house of Suevia, the crimes of king Manfred, the murder of Corradin, the Sicilian vespers, the crusade of St. Louis, the terror of the Saracens, the civil wars, and the cruelty of the many tyrants who reigned over Italy, but above all the feuds engendered by religious bigotry and the ignorance of the people have stamped upon this age a most remarkable character. We are well aware that genius does not require time or circumstances to shew itself; and therefore let us suppose that in the midst of so much horror, and so niany calamities, there appears ou that very same stage of revolution and discord, a man who, by his genius, raised himself in the midst of all these political storms, and reached the highest situation of his country. Let us now suppose this same man banished, his house pillaged, and his life condemned; let us suppose him forced to lead a wandering life, without friends, and without resources, and obliged to ask for the protection of the very tyrants whom he had despised and opposed, it is certain that the calamities of the age, and above all his own misfortunes, would have made upon the mind of this man a very deep impression, and such as would have disposed him to terrible and gloomy conceptions. Now this man was Dante. In his banishment he conceived his hell, his purgatory, his paradise. Having no friends on earth for whom he cared, he chose them from amongst the dead; Beatrice, the daughter of a Florentine gentleman, gentleman, whoin he had tenderly loved, and Virgil, the poet that he liked the most. Embracing in his plan the three situations of a future life, according to the Romish creed, he fixed the whole attention of an age, in which the last judgment, the end of the world, and a life to come, were the only objects of dispute among the clergy, and the only topics of religious conversation among the laity. -At the entrance of hell he finds some very pleasant dwellings, the Elysian fields of the ancients. In one of these he meets with Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucab; in another Electra, Hector, Lucretia, Brutus; in a third Socrates and Plato. Having so disposed those whom he admired, he reserves the true hell for the popes, cardinals, and emperors, whom he hated. Pope Boni-: facius and Count Valois suffer the most. To vilify the Count he searches after the anecdotes of the family, and reproaches him that Hugh Capet was the son of a butcher. As he knew all that could be known at his time, Dante takes advantage of the errors of astronomy, geography, and natural history; and these he never fails to turn against the Florentines and the popes. To these considerations we should add, that he employed a language which was still in its infancy, and created, as he wanted them, new and strange words. This is at once one of the causes of his obscurity and merit. He heaps comparisons on comparisons, allusions upon allusions, and technical and scholastic terms upon expressions of the same kind. He designs sometimes the actions of his dramatis personæ by the short turn of his phrases; he has a bluntness of style which produces very great effect, and often in the description of his punishments he employs such hard and fatiguing expressions, that they seem an echo to the language of his sufferers. Forcing the imagination of his readers to pass from surprise to horror, he leads them to and from his ideal world. But this mixture of events so improbable, and colours so true, forms all the magic of his poem, which resembles nothing we have seen, but which leaves in the mind the deepest impression of supernatural terror. We are astonished to see how a man could find, in his imagination, so many torments, that seem to have exhausted divine vengeance, and how could he describe them by a new language, with colours so deep and lively, during the space of the thirty four cantos in which he remains in hell. For this reason we must not be surprised at the wonderful sensation which was produced by this national poem, full of severe lashes upon the crimes of the popes, of lively allusions to recent events, and to subjects which still occupied all sorts of men, written in a boldness of language which had never been known known before, and which has only been preserved in after times by the writings of the most skilful masters of Italy. Considered in this point of view, the Commedia of Dante forms a considerable link in the literature of Italy; and perhaps not without cause it has been asserted that if there had never been a Dante, Petrarca himself would have been a Petrarca. After having given a full account of Petrarca and Boccaccio, and of the obligation which literature owes to both of these men, Mr. Berington mentions some other writers of inferior note, and passes to analyze the learning of other countries. He begins with Duns Scotus, so celebrated in the annals of the university of Oxford, and John Wickliff, the forerunner of Luther. From them he turns, to Chaucer, and thus compares the acquirements of this early English poet with those of others. "Chaucer then, it seems-if his improved versification be considered, and the beauties of many passages; with those sprinklings of philosophy which embellish his works; with his knowledge of history, of mythology, and of various other subjects, as they incidentally occur may take the first rank among our early English poets. But may we be allowed to take from him an estimate of the literature of the times, as possessed by men of superior education? or to assert, that we are as much indebted to him, as Italy was to her Dante, her Petrarca, and her Boccaccio? "What our education in the schools then was, which could be termed superior, it is not easy to ascertain, unless, in the universities, it be restricted to scholasticism, and such studies as were subservient to it; and in the classes of grammar, to such elementary instruction, as has been repeatedly described. What some men acquired more than this, was the fruit of private labour. Such was the learning of Chaucer; and he, who would consider it as the standard of the general acquirements which were possessed by those who had some claim to distinction, must be satisfied to err. The list, not inconsiderable-of more than a hundred and sixty writers of different countries, with their works, who flourished in the fourteenth century, called the Sæculum Wicklevianum-sufficiently announces who they were, and what had been their pursuits. These pursuits were often laudable; and, in their sphere, they led to fame, to emoluments, and to dignities. The conventual orders absorbed by far the greater portion of those, whom the love of retirement or of study could allure; and it was theology, in all or in some one of its branches, which became their principal occupation: while the secular clergy, if they did not pass their days in indolent repose, had recourse to the study of medicine, or, as more directly leading to preferment, to that of ecclesiastical and civil jurisprudence. Elegant literature entered into none of these walks; and therefore, as I observed, they were deserted by Petrarca and Boccaccio, and I might, I believe, have said, by Chaucer, as not in unison with that line of studies, which they had determined to pursue. These men, then, almost stood alone; |