chivalry”; it has that “inwardness which . . . distinguishes all the classic from all the modern poetry.”  It was perhaps in consequence of Coleridge’s praise that Cary’s translation went into its second edition in 1819, the year following this lecture course.  A third was published in 1831.  Italians used to complain that the foreign reader’s knowledge of the “Divine Comedy” was limited to the “Inferno,” and generally to the Ugolino and Francesca passages.  Coleridge’s quotations are all from the “Inferno,” and Lowell thinks that he had not read beyond it.  He testified that the Ugolino and Francesca stories were already “so well known and admired that it would be pedantry to analyse them.”  Sir Joshua Reynolds had made a painting of the former subject.  In 1800 William Blake produced a series of seven engravings in illustration of the “Inferno.”  In 1817 Flaxman began his illustrations of the whole “Commedia,” extending to a hundred plates.[12]

In 1819-20 Byron was living at Ravenna, the place of Dante’s death and burial[13] and of the last years of his exile.  He used to ride for hours together through Ravenna’s “immemorial wood,” [14] and the associations of the scene prompted him to put into English (March, 1820) the Francesca episode, that “thing woven as out of rainbows on a ground of eternal black.”  In the letter to Murray, sent with his translation, he wrote:  “Enclosed you will find, line for line, in third rhyme (terza rima), of which your British blackguard reader as yet understands nothing, Fanny of Rimini.  You know that she was born here, and married and slain, from Cary, Boyd, and such people.”  In his diary, Byron commented scornfully on Frederick Schlegel’s assertions that Dante had never been a favourite with his own countrymen; and that his main defect was a want of gentle feelings. “Not a favourite!  Why they talk Dante—­write Dante—­and think and dream Dante at this moment (1821) to an excess which would be ridiculous, but that he deserves it. . . .  Of gentle feelings!—­and Francesca of Rimini—­and the father’s feelings in Ugolino—­and Beatrice—­and ‘La Pia’!  Why there is a gentleness in Dante beyond all gentleness.”  Byron had not the patience to be a good translator.  His rendering is closer and, of course, more spirited than Hayley’s; but where long search for the right word was needed, and a delicate shading of phrase to reproduce without loss the meaning of this most meaning and least translatable of masters, Byron’s work shows haste and imperfection.

  “Love, who to none beloved to love again
    Remits.”

is neither an idiomatic nor in any way an adequate englishing of

  “Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona.”

Nor does

  “Accursed was the book and he who wrote,”

fully give the force of the famous

  “Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse.” [15]

The year before Byron had composed “The Prophecy of Dante,” an original poem in four cantos, in terza rima,