Hitherto the Italian Middle Age had impressed itself upon the English imagination not directly but through the richly composite art of the Renaissance schools of painting and poetry; through Raphael and his followers; through the romances of Ariosto and Tasso and their English scholar, Spenser.  Elizabethan England had been supplied with versions of the “Orlando Furioso” [2] and the “Gierusalemme Liberata,” by Harrington and Fairfax—­the latter still a standard translation and a very accomplished piece of versification.  Warton and Hurd and other romanticising critics of the eighteenth century were perpetually upholding Ariosto and Tasso against French detraction: 

  “In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire,
  And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow
  No strain which shamed his country’s creaking lyre,
  That whetstone of the teeth—­monotony in wire!” [3]

Scott’s eager championship of Ariosto has already been mentioned.[4] But the stuff of the old Charlemagne epos is sophisticated in the brilliant pages of Ariosto, who follows Pulci and Boiardo, if not in burlesquing chivalry outright, yet in treating it with a half irony.  Tasso is serious, but submits his romantic matter—­Godfrey of Boulogne and the First Crusade—­to the classical epic mould.  It was pollen from Italy, but not Italy of the Middle Ages, that fructified English poetry in the sixteenth century.  Two indeed of gli antichi, “the all Etruscan three,” communicated an impulse both earlier and later.  Love sonneteering, in emulation of Petrarca, began at Henry VIII.’s court.  Chaucer took the substance of “Troilus and Creseyde” and “The Knightes Tale” from Boccaccio’s “Filostrato” and “Teseide”; and Dryden, who never mentions Dante, versified three stories from the “Decameron.”  But Petrarch and Boccaccio were not mediaeval minds.  They represent the earlier stages of humanism and the new learning.  Dante was the genuine homme du moyen age, and Dante was the latest of the great revivals.  “Dante,” says Carlyle, “was the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the thought they lived by stands here in everlasting music.”

The difficulty, not to say obscurity, of the “Divine Comedy”; its allusive, elliptical style; its scholasticism and allegorical method; its multitudinous references to local politics and the history of thirteenth-century Italy, defied approach.  Above all, its profound, austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth.  Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.[5] In particular, deistic France, arbiter elegantiarum, felt with a shiver of repulsion,

  “How grim the master was of Tuscan song.”