choose, to a certain extent to form, the pure, vigorous, picturesque, harmonious Italian which was to be intelligible, which was to become native and popular to the universal ear of Italy. He had to create; out of a chaos he had to summon light. Every kingdom, every province, every district, almost every city, had its dialect, peculiar, separate, distinct, rude in construction, harsh, in different degrees, in utterance. Dante in his book on Vulgar Eloquence ranges over the whole land, rapidly discusses the Sicilian and Apulian, the Roman and Spoletan, the Tuscan and Genoese, the Romagnole and the Lombard, the Trevisan and Venetian, the Istrian and Friulian; all are coarse, harsh, mutilated, defective. The least bad is the vulgar Bolognese. But high above all this discord he seems to discern, and to receive into his prophetic ears, a noble and pure language, common to all, peculiar to none, a language which he describes as Illustrious, Cardinal, Courtly, if we may use our phrase, Parliamentary, that is, of the palace, the courts of justice, and of public affairs. No doubt it sprung, though its affiliation is by no means clear, out of the universal degenerate Latin, the rustic tongue, common not in Italy alone, but in all the provinces of the Roman Empire. Its first domicile was the splendid Sicilian and Apulian Court of Frederick the Second, and of his accomplished son. It has been boldly said, that it was part of Frederick's magnificent design of universal empire: he would make Italy one realm, under one king, and speaking one language. Dante does homage to the noble character of Frederick the Second. Sicily was the birthplace of Italian Poetry. The Sicilian Poems live to bear witness to the truth of Dante's assertion, which might rest on his irrefragable authority alone. The Poems, one even earlier than the Court of Frederick, those of Frederick himself, of Pietro della Vigna, of King Enzio, of King Manfred, with some peculiarities in the formation, orthography, use, and sounds of words, are intelligible from one end of the peninsula to the other. The language was echoed and perpetuated, or rather resounded spontaneously, among poets in other districts. This courtly, aristocratical, universal Italian, Dante heard as the conventional dialect in the

Courts of the Cæsars, in the republics, in the principalities throughout Italy. Perhaps Dante, the Italian, the Ghibelline, the assertor of the universal temporal monarchy, dwelt not less fondly in his imagination on this universal and noble Italian language, because it would supersede the Papal and hierarchical Latin; the Latin, with the Pope himself, would withdraw into the sanctuary, into the service of the Church, into affairs purely spiritual.

However this might be, to this vehicle of his noble thoughts Dante fearlessly intrusted his poetic immortality, which no poet anticipated with more confident security. While the scholar Petrarch condescended to the vulgar tongue in his amatory poems, which he had still a lurking fear might be but ephemeral, in his Africa and in his Latin verses he laid up, as he fondly thought, an imperishable treasure of fame. Even Boccaccio, happily for his own glory, followed the example of Dante, as he too probably supposed in his least enduring work, his gay Decamerone. Yet Boccaccio doubted, towards the close of his life, whether the Divine Comedy had not been more sublime, and therefore destined to a more secure eternity, in Latin.

Thus in Italy, with the Italian language, of which, if he was not absolutely the creator, he was the first who gave it permanent and vital being, arose one of the great poets of the world. There is a vast chasm between the close of Roman and the dawn of Italian letters, between the period at which appeared the last creative work written by transcendent human genius in the Roman language, while yet in its consummate strength and perfection, and the first in which Italian poetry and the Italian tongue came forth in their majesty; between the history of Tacitus and the Divina Commedia. No one can appreciate more highly than myself (if I may venture to speak of myself) the great works of ecclesiastical Latin, the Vulgate, parts of the Ritual, St. Augustine yet who can deny that there is barbarism, a yet unreconciled confusion of uncongenial elements, of Orientalism and Occidentalism, in the language? From the time of Trajan, except Claudian, Latin letters are almost exclusively Christian; and Christian letters are Latin, as it were,

in a secondary and degenerate form. The new era opens with Dante.

To my mind there is a singular kindred and similitude between the last great Latin and the first great Italian writer, though one is a poet, the other an historian. Tacitus and Dante have the same penetrative truth of observation as to man and the external world of man; the same power of expressing that truth. They have the common gift of flashing a whole train of thought, a vast range of images on the mind, by a few brief and pregnant words; the same faculty of giving life to human emotions by natural images, of imparting to natural images, as it were, human life and human sympathies: each has the intuitive judgment of saying just enough; the stern self-restraint which will not say more than enough; the rare talent of compressing a mass of profound thought into an apophthegm; each paints with words, with the fewest possible words, yet the picture lives and speaks. Each has that relentless moral indignation, that awful power of satire, which in the historian condemns to an immortality of earthly infamy, in the Christian poet aggravates that gloomy immortality of this world by ratifying it in the next. Each might seem to embody remorse. Patrician, high, imperial, princely, Papal criminals are compelled to acknowledge the justice of their doom. Each, too, writing, one of times just passed, of which the influences were strongly felt in the social state and fortunes of Rome, - the other of his own, in which he had been actively concerned, — throws a personal passion (Dante of course the most) into his judgments and his language, which, whatever may be its effect on their justice, adds wonderfully to their force and reality. Each, too, has a lofty sympathy with good, only that the highest ideal of Tacitus is a death-defying Stoic, or an all-accomplished Roman Proconsul, an Helvidius Thrasea, or an Agricola ; that of Dante, a suffering, and so purified and beatified Christian saint, or martyr; in Tacitus it is a majestic and virtuous Roman matron, an Agrippina, in Dante an unreal mysterious Beatrice.

Dante is not merely the religious poet of Latin or medieval Christianity; in him that medieval Christianity is

summed up as it were, and embodied for perpetuity. The Divine Comedy contains in its sublimest form the whole mythology, and at the same time the quintessence, the living substance, the ultimate conclusions of the Scholastic Theology. The whole course of Legend, the Demonology, Angelology, the extra mundane world, which in the popular belief was vague, fragmentary, incoherent, in Dante, as we have seen, becomes an actual, visible, harmonious system. In Dante heathen images, heathen mythology, are blended in the same living reality with those of Latin Christianity, but they are real in the sense of the early Christian Fathers. They are acknowledged as a part of the vast hostile Demon world, just as the Angelic Orders, which from Jewish or Oriental tradition obtained their first organization in the hierarchy of the Areopagite. So, too, the schools of Theology meet in the poet. Aquinas, it has been said, has nothing more subtile and metaphysical than the Paradise, only chat in Dante single lines, or pregnant stanzas, have the full meaning of pages or chapters of divinity. But though his doctrine is that of Aquinas, Dante has all the fervor and passion of the Mystics; he is Bonaventura as well as St. Thomas.

Dante was in all respects but one, his Ghibellinism, the religious poet of his age, and to many minds not less religious for that exception. He was anti-Papal, but with the fullest reverence for the spiritual supremacy of the successor of St. Peter. To him, as to most religious Imperialists or Ghibellines, to some of the spiritual Franciscans, to a vast host of believers throughout Christendom, the Pope was two distinct personages. One, the temporal, they scrupled not to condemn with the fiercest reprobation, to hate with the bitterest cordiality: Dante damns pontiffs without fear or remorse. But the other, the Spiritual Pope, was worthy of all awe or reverence; his sacred person must be inviolate; his words, if not infallible, must be heard with the profoundest respect; he is the Vicar of Christ, the representative of God upon earth. With his Ghibelline brethren Dante closed his eyes against the incongruity, the inevitable incongruity, of these two discordant personages

meeting in one: the same Boniface is in hell, yet was of such acknowledged sanctity on earth that it was spiritual treason to touch his awful person. The Saints of Dante are the Saints of the Church; on the highest height of wisdom is St. Thomas, on the highest height of holiness, St. Benedict, St. Dominic, St. Francis. To the religious adversaries of the Church he has all the stern remorselessness of an inquisitor. The noble Frederick the Second, whom we have just heard described as the parent of Italian poetry, the model of a mighty Emperor, the Cæsar of Cæsars, is in hell as an arch-heretic, as an atheist. In hell, in the same dreary circle, up to his waist in fire, is the noblest of the Ghibellines, Farinata degli Uberti. In hell for the same sin is the father of his dearest friend and brother poet Guido Cavalcanti. Whatever latent sympathy seems to transpire for Fra Dolcino, he is unrelentingly thrust down to the companionship of Mohammed. The Catholic may not reverse the sentence of the Church.

DANTE'S LANDSCAPES.

From Ruskin's Modern Painters, Vol. III. ch. 14.

THE thing that must first strike us in this respect, as we turn our thoughts to the poem, is, unquestionably, the formality of its landscape.

Milton's effort, in all that he tells us of his Inferno, is to make it indefinite; Dante's, to make it definite. Both, indeed, describe it as entered through gates; but, within the gate, all is wild and fenceless with Milton, having indeed its four rivers, - the last vestige of the mediæval tradition, but rivers which flow through a waste of mountain and moorland, and by "many a frozen, many a fiery alp." But Dante's Inferno is accurately separated into circles drawn with well-pointed compasses;, mapped and properly surveyed in every direction, trenched in a thoroughly good style of engineering from depth to depth, and divided in the "accurate middle" (dritto mezzo) of its deepest abyss into a concentric series of ten moats and embankments, like those