After the appearance of Cary’s version, critical comprehension of Dante grew rapidly.  In the same year when Coleridge gave his lectures, Hallam published his “Middle Ages,” which contained a just though somewhat coldly worded estimate of the great Italian.  This was amplified in his later work, “The Literature of Europe” (1838-39).  Hallam said that Dante was the first name in the literature of the Middle Ages, the creator of his nation’s poetry, and the most original of all writers, and the most concise.  But he blamed him for obscurity, forced and unnatural turns of expression, and barbarous licenses of idiom.  The “Paradise” seemed to him tedious, as a whole, and much of the “Purgatory” heavy.  Hallam repeated, if he did not originate that nice bit of discernment, that in his “Paradise” Dante uses only three leading ideas—­light, music, and motion.  Then came Macaulay’s essay “Milton,” in the Edinburgh for 1825, with the celebrated parallel between the “Divine Comedy” and the “Paradise Lost,” and the contrast between Dante’s “picturesque” and Milton’s “imaginative” method.  Macaulay’s analysis has been questioned by Ruskin and others; some of his positions were perhaps mistaken, but they were the most advanced that English Dante criticism had as yet taken up.  And finally came Carlyle’s vivid piece of portrait painting in “Hero Worship” (1841).  The first literal prose translation of any extent from the “Commedia” was the “Inferno” by Carlyle’s brother John (1849).

Since the middle of the century Dante study and Dante literature in English-speaking lands have waxed enormously.  Dante societies have been founded in England and America.  Almost every year sees another edition, a new commentary or a fresh translation in prose, in blank verse, in terza rima, or in some form of stanza.  It is not exaggerating to say that there is more public mention of Dante now in a single year than in all the years of the eighteenth century together.  It would be interesting, if it were possible, to count the times that Dante’s name occurs in English writings of the eighteenth and then of the nineteenth century; afterwards to do the same with Ariosto and Tasso and compare the results.  It would be found that, while the eighteenth century set no very high value on Ariosto and Tasso, it ignored Dante altogether; and that the nineteenth has put aside the superficial mediaevalism of the Renaissance romancers and gone back to the great religious romancer of the Italian Middle Age.  There is no surer plummet than Dante’s to sound the spiritual depth of a time.  It is in the nineteenth century first that Shakspere and Dante took possession of the European mind.  In 1800 Shakspere was an English, or at most an English and German poet, and Dante exclusively an Italian.  In 1900 they had both become world poets.  Shakspere’s foreign conquests were the earlier and are still the wider, as wide perhaps as the expanse—­