Almost five centuries have passed since Benvenuto of Imola, one of the most distinguished men of letters of his time, was called by the University of Bologna to read a course of lectures upon the “Divina Commedia” before the students at that famous seat of learning.  From that time till the present, a great part of his “Comment” has lain in manuscript, sharing the fate of the other earliest commentaries on the poem of Dante, not one of which, save that of Boccaccio, was given to the press till within a few years.  This neglect is the more strange, since it was from the writers of the fourteenth century, almost contemporary as they were with Dante, that the most important illustrations both of the letter and of the sense of the “Divina Commedia” were naturally to be looked for.  When they wrote, the lapse of time had not greatly obscured the memory of the events which the poet had recorded, or to which he had referred.  The studies with which he had been familiar, the external sources from which he had drawn inspiration, had undergone no essential change in direction or in nature.  The same traditions and beliefs possessed the intellects of men.  Similar social and political influences moulded their characters.  The distance that separated Dante from his first commentators was mainly due to the surpassing nature of his genius, which, in some sort, made him, and still makes him, a stranger to all men, and very little to changes like those which have slowly come about in the passage of centuries, and which divide his modern readers from the poet.

It was the intention of Benvenuto, as he tells us, “to elucidate what was dark in the poem being veiled under figures, and to explain what was involved in its multiplex meanings.”  But his Comment is more illustrative than analytic, more literal than imaginative, and its chief value lies in the abundance of current legends which it contains, and in the number of stories related in it, which exhibit the manners or illustrate the history of the times.  So great, indeed, is the value of this portion of his work, that Muratori, to whom a large debt of gratitude is due from all students of Italian history, published in 1738, in the first volume of his “Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi,” a selection of such passages, amounting altogether to about one half of the whole Comment.  However satisfactory this incomplete publication might be to the mere historical investigator, the students of the “Divina Commedia” could not but regret that the complete work had not been printed,—­and they accordingly welcomed with satisfaction the announcement, a few years since, of the volumes whose title stands at the head of this article, which professed to contain a translation of the whole Comment.  It seemed a pity, indeed, that it should have been thought worth while to translate a book addressing itself to a very limited number of readers, most of whom were quite as likely to understand the original Latin as the modern Italian, while also a special value attached to the style and form in which it was first written.  But no one could have suspected what “translation” meant in the estimation of the Signor Tamburini, whose name appears on the title-page as that of the translator.