“Since the French, the restorers of the art of criticism, cast a damp upon original invention, the character of Dante has been thrown under a deeper shade.  That agreeable and volatile nation found in themselves an insuperable aversion to the gloomy and romantic bard, whose genius, ardent, melancholy, and sublime, was so different from their own.”

Boyd used a six-lined stanza, a singularly ill chosen medium for rendering the terza rima; and his diction was as wordy and vague as Dante’s is concise and sharp of edge.  A single passage will illustrate his manner: 

  “So full the symphony of grief arose,
  My heart, responsive to the lovers’ woes,
    With thrilling sympathy convulsed my breast. 
  Too strong at last for life my passion grew,
  And, sickening at the lamentable view,
    I fell like one by mortal pangs oppressed.” [10]

The first opportunity which the mere English reader had to form any real notion of Dante, was afforded by Henry Francis Cary’s translation in blank verse (the “Inferno,” with the Italian text in 1805; the entire “Commedia” in 1814, with the title “The Vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise").  This was a work of talent, if not of genius; and in spite of the numerous versions in prose and verse that have since appeared, it continues the most current and standard Dante in England, if not in America, where Longfellow naturally challenges precedence.  The public was as yet so unprepared to appreciate Dante that Cary’s work received little attention until brought into notice by Coleridge; and the translator was deeply chagrined by the indifference, not to say hostility, with which his labours were acknowledged.  In the memoir[11] of Cary by his son there is a letter from Anne Seward—­the Swan of Lichfield—­which throws a singular light upon the critical taste of the “snug coterie and literary lady” of the period.  She writes:  “How can you profess to be charmed with the few faint outlines of landscape painting in Dante, who are blind to the beautiful, distinct, and profuse scenery in the pages of Ossian?” She goes on to complain that the poem, in its English dress, is vulgar and obscure.

Coleridge devoted to Dante a part of his series of lectures given at London in 1818, reading copious selections from Cary’s version.  The translator had claimed, in his introduction, that the Florentine poet “leaves to Homer and Shakespeare alone the power of challenging the preeminence or equality.”  Coleridge emphasized the “endless, subtle beauties of Dante”; the vividness, logical connection, strength, and energy of his style.  In this he pronounced him superior to Milton; and in picturesqueness he affirmed that he surpassed all other poets ancient or modern.  With characteristic penetration he indicated the precise position of Dante in mediaeval literature; his poetry is “the link between religion and philosophy”; it is “christianized, but without the further Gothic accession of proper