[4] Vide supra, p. 5.

[5] Vide supra, p. 40.  Goethe pronounced the “Inferno” abominable, the “Purgatorio” doubtful, and the “Paradise” tiresome (Plumptre’s “Dante,” London, 1887, vol. ii., p. 484).

[6] See Walpole’s opinion, vol. i., p. 235.

[7] For early manuscript renderings see “Les Plus Anciennes Traductions Francaises de la Divine Comedie,” par C. Morel, Paris, 1897.

[8] Lowell says Kannegiesser’s, 1809.

[9] “Present State of Polite Learning” (1759).

[10] “Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse,
       L’altro piangeva si, che di pietade
     I venni men, cosi com’ io morisse: 
       E cadde come corpo morte cade.” 
             —­“Inferno,” Canto v.

[11] Vol. i., p. 236.

[12] Plumptre’s “Dante,” vol. ii., p. 439.

[13] “Ungrateful Florence!  Dante sleeps afar,
     Like Scipio, buried, by the upbraiding shore.” 
            —­“Childe Harold,” iv., 57.

[14] See vol. i., p. 49; and “Purgatorio,” xxviii., 19-20.

“Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie
Per la pineta in sal lito di Chiassi.”

[15] He did better in free paraphrase than in literal translation. Cf. Stanza cviii., in “Don Juan,” Canto iii.—­

“Soft hour! which wakes the wish and melts the heart”—­

with its original in the “Purgatorio,” viii., 1-6.

[16] Dedication to La Guiccioli.

[17] But in this poem each thirteenth and fourteenth line make a couplet, thus breaking up the whole into a series of loose sonnets.

[18] T. W. Parsons’ “Lines on a Bust of Dante” appeared in the Boston Advertiser in 1841.  His translation of the first ten cantos of the “Inferno” was published in 1843:  later instalments in 1867 and 1893.  Longfellow’s version of the “Divine Comedy” with the series of sonnets by the translator came out in 1867-70.  For the Dante work of the Rossettis, vide infra, pp. 282 ff.

[19] “The Seer.”

[20] He named a daughter, born while he was in prison, after Spenser’s Florimel.

[21] “Autobiography,” p. 200 (ed. of 1870).

[22] See Dickens’ caricature of him as Harold Skimpole in “Bleak House.”

[23] “When I was last at Haydon’s,” wrote Keats to his brother George in 1818-19, “I looked over a book of prints taken from the fresco of the church at Milan, the name of which I forget.  In it were comprised 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 everything I ever saw, not excepting Raphael’s—­but grotesque to a curious pitch—­yet still making up a fine whole, even finer to me than more accomplished works, as there was left so much room for imagination.”

[24] Against the hundreds of maxims from Pope, Keats furnishes a single motto—­the first line of “Endymion”—­