“I estimate highly,” wrote Voltaire to an Italian correspondent, “the courage with which you have dared to say that Dante was a madman[6] and his work a monster. . . .  There are found among us and in the eighteenth century, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupid and barbarous.”  A French translation of the “Divine Comedy” had been printed by the Abbe Grangier[7] at Paris in 1596; but Rivarol, whose “Inferno” was published in 1783, was the first Frenchman, says Lowell, to divine Dante’s greatness.  The earliest German version was Bachenschwanz’s prose translation of the “Commedia” (Leipsic, 1767-69),[8] but the German romantic school were the first to furnish a sympathetic interpretation of Dante to their countrymen.

Chaucer was well acquainted with the work of “the grete poet of Florence,” and drew upon him occasionally, though by no means so freely as upon Boccaccio.  Thus in “The Monkes Tale” he re-tells, in a very inferior fashion, the tragedy of Ugolino.  In “The Parliament of Foules” and “The Hous of Fame” there are distinct imitations of Dante.  A passage from the “Purgatory” is quoted in the “Wif of Bathes Tale,” etc.  Spenser probably, and Milton certainly, knew their Dante.  Milton’s sonnet to Henry Lawes mentions Dante’s encounter with the musician Casella “in the milder shades of Purgatory.”  Here and there a reference to the “Divine Comedy” occurs in some seventeenth-century English prose writer like Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor.  It is thought that the description of Hell in Sackville’s “Mirror for Magistrates” shows an acquaintance with the “Inferno.”  But Dante had few readers in England before the nineteenth century.  He was practically unknown there and in all of Europe outside of Italy.  “His reputation,” said Voltaire, “will go on increasing because scarce anybody reads him.”  And half a century later Napoleon said the same thing in the same words:  “His fame is increasing and will continue to increase because no one ever reads him.”

In the third volume of his “History of English Poetry” (1781), Thomas Warton had spoken of the “Divine Comedy” as “this wonderful compound of classical and romantic fancy, of pagan and Christian theology, of real and fictitious history, of tragical and comic incidents, of familiar and heroic manners, and of satirical and sublime poetry.  But the grossest improprieties of this poem discover an originality of invention, and its absurdities often border on sublimity.  We are surprised that a poet should write one hundred cantos on hell, paradise, and purgatory.  But this prolixity is partly owing to the want of art and method, and is common to all early compositions, in which everything is related circumstantially and without rejection, and not in those general terms which are used by modern writers.”  Warton is shocked at Dante’s “disgusting fooleries” and censures his departure from Virgilian grace.  Milton “avoided the childish or ludicrous excesses of these bold inventions . . . but rude and early poets describe everything.”  But Warton felt Dante’s greatness.  “Hell,” he wrote, “grows darker at his frown.”  He singled out for special mention the Francesca and Ugolino episodes.