How can the patriots of modern Italy, justified as they are in extolling the poet to the skies, see him plunge into such depths of bigotry in his verse and childishness in his prose, and consent to perplex the friends of advancement with making a type of their success out of so erring though so great a man?  Such slavishness, even to such greatness, is a poor and unpromising thing, compared with an altogether unprejudiced and forward-looking self-reliance.  To have no faith in names has been announced as one of their principles; and “God and Humanity” is their motto.  What, therefore, has Dante’s name to do with their principles? or what have the semi-barbarisms of the thirteenth century to do with the final triumph of “God and Humanity?” Dante’s lauded wish for that union of the Italian States, which his fame has led them so fondly to identify with their own, was but a portion of his greater and prouder wish to see the whole world at the feet of his boasted ancestress, Rome.  Not, of course, that he had no view to what he considered good and just government (for what sane despot purposes to rule without that?); but his good and just government was always to be founded on the sine qua non principle of universal Italian domination.[35]

All that Dante said or did has its interest for us in spite of his errors, because he was an earnest and suffering man and a great genius; but his fame must ever continue to lie where his greatest blame does, in his principal work.  He was a gratuitous logician, a preposterous politician, a cruel theologian; but his wonderful imagination, and (considering the bitterness that was in him) still more wonderful sweetness, have gone into the hearts of his fellow-creatures, and will remain there in spite of the moral and religious absurdities with which they are mingled, and of the inability which the best-natured readers feel to associate his entire memory, as a poet, with their usual personal delight in a poet and his name.

[Footnote 1:  As notices of Dante’s life have often been little but repetitions of former ones, I think it due to the painstaking character of this volume to state, that besides consulting various commentators and critics, from Boccaccio to Fraticelli and others, I have diligently perused the Vita di Dante, by Cesare Balbo, with Rocco’s annotations; the Histoire Litteraire d’Italie, by Ginguene; the Discorso sul Testo della Commedia, by Foscolo; the Amori e Rime di Dante of Arrivabene; the Veltro Allegorico di Dante, by Troja; and Ozanam’s Dante et la Philosophie Catholique an Treixieme Siecle.]

[Footnote 2:  Canto xv. 88.]

[Footnote 3:  For the doubt apparently implied respecting the district, see canto xvi. 43, or the summary of it in the present volume.  The following is the passage alluded to in the philosophical treatise “Risponder si vorrebbe, non colle parole, ma col coltello, a tanta bestialita.” Convito,—­Opere Minori, 12mo, Fir. 1834, vol.  II. p. 432.  “Beautiful mode” (says Perticeri in a note) “of settling questions.”]