DANTE 673 of the Divina Commedia made daring the 14th century, and now existing in the libra- ries of Europe, are more numerous than those of any other work, ancient or modern, made during the same period. Between the inven- tion of printing and the year 1500 more than 20 editions were published in Italy, the earliest in 1472. During the 16th century there were 40 editions ; during the 17th, a period for Italy of skeptical dilettantism, only 3 ; during the 18th, 34 ; and during the first half of the 19th, at least 80. The first translation was into Spanish, in 1428. M. St. Rene Taillan- dier says that the Commedia was condemned by the inquisition in Spain ; but according to Fos- colo, it was only the commentary of Landino and Vellutello, and a few verses in the Inferno and Paradiso, which were condemned. The first French translation was that of Grangier (1596) ; but the study of Dante struck no root in France till the present century. Rivarol, who translated the Inferno in 1783, was the first Frenchman to divine the wonderful force and vi- tality of the Commedia. The expressions of Vol- taire represent very well the opinion of cultiva- ted persons in respect of Dante in the middle of the 18th century. He says : "The Italians call him divine ; but it is a hidden divinity ; few people understand his oracles. He has commentators, which perhaps is another reason for his not being understood. His reputation will go on increasing, because scarce anybody reads him." To Father Bettinelli he writes : " I estimate highly the courage with which you have dared to say that Dante was a madman and his work a monster." But he adds : " There are found among us, and in the 18th century, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupidly extravagant and barbarous." Else- where he says that the Commedia was "an odd poem, but gleaming with natural beauties, a work in which the author rose in parts above the bad taste of his age and his subject, and full of passages written as purely as if they had been of the time of Ariosto and Tasso." It is curious to see the fascination which Dante exercised over a nature so opposite to his own. At the beginning of this century Chateaubri- and speaks of Dante with vague commenda- tion, evidently from a very superficial acquain- tance, and that only with the Inferno, probably from Rivarol's version. Since then there have been four or five French versions in prose or verse, including one by Lamennais. But the austerity of Dante will not condescend to the conventional elegance which makes the charm of French, and the most virile of poets cannot be adequately rendered in the most feminine of languages. Yet in the works of Fauriel, Ozanam, Ampere, and Villemain, France has given a greater impulse to the study of Dante than any other country except Germany. Into Germany the Commedia penetrated later. How utterly Dante was unknown there in the 16th century is plain from a passage in the " Vanity of the Arts and Sciences " of Corne- lius Agrippa, where he is spoken of among the authors of lascivious stories. The first Ger- man translation was that of Kannegiesser (1809). Versions by Streckfuss, Kopisch, and Prince John (afterward king) of Saxony fol- lowed. Goethe seems never to have given that attention to Dante which he might have been expected to bestow on so imposing a moral and aesthetic phenomenon. Unless the con- clusion of the second part of "Faust" be an inspiration of the Paradiso, there is no ade- quate word from him on this theme. His re- marks on one of the German translations are brief, dry, and without that breadth which comes only of thorough knowledge and sym- pathy. But German scholarship and construc- tive criticism, through Witte, Kopisch, Wegele, Ruth, and others, have been of preeminent ser- vice in deepening the understanding and facil- itating the study of the poet. In England, the first recognition of Dante is by Chaucer in the "Hugelin of Pisa" of the "MonkesTale," and an imitation of the opening verses of the 3d canto of the Inferno ("Assembly of Foules"). In 1417 Giovanni da Serravalle, bishop of Fer- mo, completed a Latin prose translation of the Commedia, a copy of which was doubtless sent to England. Later we find Dante now and then mentioned, but evidently from hear- say only, till the time of Milton, who shows that he had read his works closely. Thence- forward for more than a century Dante became a mere name, used without meaning by literary sciolists. Lord Chesterfield echoes Voltaire, and Dr. Drake spoke of Darwin's "Botanic Garden " as showing the " wild and terrible sublimity of Dante " ! The first complete Eng- lish translation was by Boyd, of the Inferno in 1785, of the whole poem in 1802. Gary's admirable version appeared in 1814, and several other translations within a few years after. But it is only since 1840 that the study of Dante has become at all general. In America Prof. Ticknor was the first to devote a special course of lectures to Dante. He was followed by Longfellow in a course of lectures accom- panied by translations, and in 1843 by Parsons, who rendered the first ten cantos of the In- ferno into quatrains. Since then Longfellow has translated the entire Divina Commedia, and Parsons the whole of the Inferno. In Denmark and Russia translations of the Inferno have been published, besides separate volumes of comment and illustration. The veneration of Dantophilists for their master is that of disciples for their saint. Perhaps no other man could have called forth such an expression as that of Ruskin, that "the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual facul- ties, all at their highest, is Dante." The wri- tings of Dante are all (with the possible excep- tion of the treatise De Vulgari Eloquio) auto- biographic, and all of them, including that, are parts of a mutually related system, of which the central point is the individuality and ex-
