If Warton could write thus it is not surprising to discover among classical critics either a total silence as to Dante, or else a systematic depreciation.  Addison does not mention him in his Italian travels; and in his “Saturday papers” misses the very obvious chance for a comparison between Dante and Milton such as Macaulay afterwards elaborated in his essay on Milton.  Goldsmith, who knew nothing of Dante at first hand, wrote of him with the usual patronising ignorance of eighteenth-century criticism as to anything outside of the Greek and Latin classics:  “He addressed a barbarous people in a method suited to their apprehension, united purgatory and the river Styx, St. Paul and Virgil, heaven and hell together; and shows a strange mixture of good sense and absurdity.  The truth is, he owes most of his reputation to the obscurity of the times in which he lived.” [1]

In 1782, William Hayley, the biographer of Cowper and author of that very mild poem “The Triumphs of Temper,” published a verse “Essay on Epic Poetry” in five epistles.  In his notes to the third epistle, he gave an outline of Dante’s life with a translation of his sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti and of the first three cantos of the “Inferno.”  “Voltaire,” he says, has spoken of Dante “with that precipitate vivacity which so frequently led the lively Frenchman to insult the reputation of the noblest writers.”  He refers to the “judicious and spirited summary” of the “Divine Comedy” in Warton, and adds, “We have several versions of the celebrated story of Ugolino; but I believe no entire canto of Dante has hitherto appeared in our language. . . .  The author has been solicited to execute an entire translation of Dante, but the extreme inequality of this poet would render such a work a very laborious undertaking; and it appears very doubtful how far such a version would interest our country.  Perhaps the reception of these cantos may discover to the translator the sentiments of the public.”  Hayley adopted “triple rhyme,” i.e., the terza rima, and said that he did not recollect it had ever been used before in English.  His translation is by no means contemptible—­much better than Boyd’s,—­but fails entirely to catch Dante’s manner or to keep the strange precision and picturesqueness of his phrase.  Thus he renders

  “Chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco,”

  “Whose voice was like the whisper of a lute”;

and the poet is made to address Beatrice—­O donna di virtu—­as “bright fair,” as if she were one of the belles in “The Rape of the Lock.”  In this same year a version of the “Inferno” was printed privately and anonymously by Charles Rogers, a book and art collector and a friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds.  But the first complete translation of the “Comedy” into English was made by Henry Boyd, a clergyman of the Irish Church; the “Inferno” in 1785 (with a specimen from Ariosto); the whole in 1802.  Boyd was a quite obscure person, author among other things of a Spenserian poem entitled “The Woodman’s Tale,” and his translation attracted little notice.  In his introduction he compares Dante with Homer, and complains that “the venerable old bard . . . has been long neglected”; perhaps, he suggests, because his poem could not be tried by Aristotle’s rules or submitted to the usual classical tests.