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by getting upon Virgil's back, but by the transcendent beauty of particular passages of his Vision,-is equally misapprehended in the connexion, the transitions, and the scope of his immortal work. And the origin of misconception and the grounds of dislike we believe to be in both cases the same;― namely, that acute and comprehensive as Mr. Landor's intellect unquestionably is, and nurtured and instructed with ..... soul-sustaining songs of ancient lore, And philosophic wisdom, clear and mild,"

it is nevertheless potent within a certain circle only; it flags and falls whenever the idea of the infinite, whether as a postulate in philosophy or as a fact in theology, is presented to it, or it has come within the circuit and attraction of such minds as the Florentine's and the Athenian philosopher's.

Before we bring forward any proofs of this somewhat perverse tendency of Mr. Landor's mind to materialise and mete out, according to an insufficient standard, studies and speculations that necessarily at either extremity touch upon infinity, we will present our readers with a brief outline of the scheme and contents of the Pentameron, and show them how it comes to pass that the merits of " il gran padre Alighieri” are made the subject of discourse, and in what manner the record of it came to be rendered into English.

It appears then, from the " Editor's introduction," that a bell being wanted for his church at San Vivaldo, the Prete Domenico Grigi, the Piévano, came not long since to England to solicit aid from the faithful towards the purchase of one. He was moved thereto by a rumour that his holy religion was rapidly gaining ground in this country, partly owing, as he discovered-at least so we infer from certain expressions in the Piévano's postscript-to the rapacity of our bishops, in making over to their families the possessions of the episcopacy; and partly to certain Sabbatarians, with whom the bishops were in league, to proscribe country air and roast meat to the poor on Sundays. The importance of the Piévano's mission is increased by the circumstance" that no new bell whatever had been consecrated in the diocese of Samminiato since the year of our Lord 1611; in which year, on the first Sunday of August, a thunder-bolt fell into the belfry of the

Duomo, owing to the negligence of Canonico Malatesta ; who, according to history, in his hurry to dine with Conte Geronimo Bardi, at San Vivaldo, omitted a word in the mass.”

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Subsidiary to his purpose of making collection for his bell, the Piévano brought with him, and caused to be translated by the best hand he could afford to engage, "certain interviews of Messer Francesco Petrarca and Messer Giovanni Boccacio," which the booksellers told him should be entitled The Pentameron', unless he would return with nothing in his pocket. The discourse held at these interviews, which, as the name imports, lasted for five days, is a lengthened "imaginary conversation" accompanied with divers pleasant digressions and descriptions. It was held "when said Messer Giovanni lay infirm at his Viletta hard by Certaldo”, and it shows how he and Messer Francesco "discoursed upon that famous theologian Messer Dante Alighieri and sundry other matters." After which meeting " they saw not each other on our side of Paradise".

It is well known that, several years before his death-much earlier than Mr. Landor, if indeed he cared about the matter, has placed it-Boccacio, in a sudden fit of remorse, resolved to abandon poetry and profane literature, and, if possible, to suppress his Decameron, and to commit whatever copies he could procure to the flames. Mr. Landor's supposition that he intended to make a holocaust of the Decameron is singular, since, as himself makes Boccacio say, in reference to the copies of the Inferno, "What effect could be produced by burning a book which had circulated rapidly throughout Italy, in manuscript and orally, immediately on its publication?" Fortunately, however, Petrarca was consulted; and his advice was, that Giovanni should read his books as usual, mend his morals, and by no means burn his Tales. This salutary counsel was really given in a long letter; but for the occasions of the Pentameron, Petrarca comes in person to "his friend's Viletta hard by Certaldo," having travelled thither over mountain-roads, flooded with rain, in haste and alarm, lest Boccacio shall have acted upon the resolution he had announced. Such is the prelude to the Interviews.'

Very early in the first day's conversation Petrarca utters the somewhat startling opinion, that "less than a twentieth

of the Divina Commedia is good," and immediately afterwards adds, that "at least sixteen parts in twenty of the Inferno and Purgatorio are detestable, both in poetry and in principle;”—he admits, indeed, in the same sentence," the higher parts" to be "excellent indeed." But a poet with so great an admixture of baser alloy with even the purest and most precious metal, must surely owe to prescription or to accident, rather than to his merits, his received station as the prince and patriarch of his national literature; and the question arises, how he came by it at all? We might attribute such an opinion to Petrarca's supposed jealousy of Dante; but this Mr. Landor denies to have ever existed; and indeed, historically, it does not rest on a good foundation. We suspect, however, that Petrarca, or rather his present mover and mouthpiece, the author of the Pentameron, has not considered with sufficient accuracy the Divina Commedia in reference to its position in the scale of imaginative and initiatory works, the time of its composition, the life and education of its author, and its different effects upon contemporaries and posterity. We shall therefore endeavour to point out as concisely as possible a prevailing error in judging the great work of Alighieri,-premising only that our remarks will apply to it as a whole, and not directly to any separate parts or passages, whether excellent or faulty, of his tripartite Vision.

Most of the prevailing misconceptions of the Divina Commedia arise from its being classed with an order of poems to which it does not belong. Dante is compared, for sublimity, to Æschylus and Milton, whereas, as Mr. Coleridge has observed, "profoundness rather than sublimity" is the characteristic of Dante's genius; "he does not so much elevate your thoughts as send them down deeper." For intensity of expression, and a certain passionate earnestness of sentiment, he is likened to Lucretius; and relatively to his initiatory station in literature, to Homer. With the latter he has the fewest points in common; the only ground of comparison between them being the simplicity and natural freshness of the similes, and the absence of idiosyncrasy and particular feelings whenever the poet suspends the action of his poem to introduce an image from nature or from social life. In all other respects the mythology and machinery of

the Homeric poems are not more remote from the demons and the bolge of the Inferno than the genius of the Ghibelline from that of the Ionian poet. Perhaps Lucretius is the nearest parallel to Dante. But were it necessary to find in the ethnic literature of Italy a type or prefiguration of Dante, we must go back to an earlier age, when the language of Rome was rhythmical and resonant, and not the worse for a certain nodosity in its texture. Later than Ennius, had a Divina Commedia been possible in Pagandom, neither the state of the language, nor the bent and process of national cultivation, nor the predominance of Greek models, would have allowed it to exist.

That in Christian literature Dante stands alone, is evident; but wherefore and wherein he is unapproachable, or at least has not been approached, is less obvious. If lofty and sustained thought, intense passion, scholastic erudition, and a perfect mastery, not merely of the resources and the most difficult evolutions, but also of the elements and primordia of language, are taken as his characteristics-and justly and peculiarly they are so-these will not account for the singular structure of his great poem. Something further must be sought, so as, if we may be allowed the expression, to differentiate him from other minds of kindred energy and loftiness. In its totality the Divina Commedia is strictly neither ethnic nor Gothic, nor, though it partakes of them, is it made up, like the poetry of Petrarca, of Platonic and chivalric sentiment. The sublime and the loathsome, the beautiful and the horrible, are not only placed side by side in these visions of Perdition and Penance, but intimately blended and densely crowded together. We cannot, in surveying the plan of Dante's poem, sift and detach the graceful and the happy from that which is distorted, ugly and miserable. Remove the singular unity he has given to his pictures, and the result is an uncontrollable chaos. What then is the law of combination? where the compass and the line and the measuring rod of his work?

The unity of the Epopeia is the final obedience of all events within the period of its action to the wisdom or the valour of the hero, who, again, is but the "chosen vessel" and instrument for working out some end or determination-the Atos

Bový-of the heavenly powers. The unity of the Divina Commedia, on the other hand, is, relatively to its author and hero of the Vision,' not an outward but a subjective one. The events of the poem bear upon the author, whose purification and recovery from worldly error and sin, and whose confirmation in a more holy and intellectual life are the object of the vision, and the pleasure of the "spirits in bliss" who commission Beatrice and Virgil to work out his deliverance. The events themselves however are unchangeable until the final judgement of the souls,

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The dramatic action in Dante centres therefore in himself; Virgil, Beatrice, and St. Bernard being but the symbols and representative forms of the successions of his feelings and the course of his purification. In so far the Divina Commedia resembles the ancient Tragedy rather than the Epopeia, in its hero being the instrument of a will hidden from and governing his own consciousness. For in an epic poem the hero is made instrumental to his own glory; but in the drama of fate, as the Greek drama has been justly denominated, the chief actors are blindly and inevitably working out long predestined effects, and fulfilling ancestral prophecies.

The dramatic character of the Commedia, again, is diminished and taken off by the absolute passiveness of Dante to the will and instructions of his guides; his individual will being suspended and in abeyance throughout his extramundane journey.

Some years since, any one who should have ascribed to the Pilgrim's Progress higher commendations than that of being a vigorous and whimsical book, would have been set down as either ironical or perverse. Cowper was hardy enough to praise, but not sufficiently so to mention Bunyan, "lest so despised a name should move a sneer." But this sickliness of taste in instructed readers is happily passed away; and they who have access to the choicest treasures of literature are the first to admit the surpassing invention and fancy of the author of the Progress, The Holy War, and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. Mr. D'Israeli calls Bunyan

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