“That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne.”

But the ground that Dante has won he holds with equal secureness.  Not that he will ever be popular, in Shakspere’s way; and yet it is far gone when the aesthete in a comic opera is described as a “Francesca da Rimini young man.”

As a stimulus to creative work the influence of Dante, though not entirely absent, is not conspicuous in the first half of the century.  It is not until the time of the Rossettis in England and of Longfellow and Dr. Parsons in America that any poetry of a really Dantesque inspiration and, at the same time, of high original value was added to our literature.[18]

The first fruits of the Dante revival in England, in the shape of original production, was Leigh Hunt’s “Story of Rimini” (1816)—­“Mr. Hunt’s smutty story of Rimini,” as the Tory wits of Blackwood were fond of calling it in their onslaughts upon the Cockney school.  This was a romaunt in four cantos upon the already familiar episode of Francesca, that “lily in the mouth of Tartarus.”  Hunt took Dryden’s “Fables” as his model in versification, employing the heroic couplet with the frequent variation of the triplet and the alexandrine.  The poem is not at all Dantesque in its lax and fluent sweetness, and in that colloquial, familiar manner which is constant in all Hunt’s writing, both prose and verse; reminding one, at its best, of Chaucer, who was, indeed, one of his favourite masters.  Hunt softens the ferocity of the tale as given by Boccaccio, according to whom the husband Giovanni Malatesta was a cripple, and killed the lovers in flagrante delicto.  Hunt makes him a personable man, though of proud and gloomy temper.  He slays his brother Paolo in chivalrous fashion and in single combat, and Francesca dies of a broken heart.  The descriptive portions of the “Story of Rimini” are charming:  the feudal procession with trumpeters, heralds, squires, and knights, sent to escort home the bride, the pine forest outside Ravenna, and the garden at Rimini in which the lovers used to meet—­

  “Places of nestling green for poets made.”

Hunt had a quick eye for colour; a fondness, not altogether free from affectation, for dainty phrases; and a feminine love of little niceties in dress, tapestry, needlework, and furnishings.  The poem was written mostly in prison where its author spent two years for a libel on the Prince Regent.  Byron used to visit him there and bring him books bearing on Francesca’s history.  Hunt brought into the piece romantic stuff from various sources, including a summary of the book which betrayed the lovers to their fatal passion, the romance of “Lancelot du Lac.”  And Giovanni speaks to his dying brother a paraphrase of the celebrated eulogy pronounced over Lancelot by Sir Ector in the “Morte Darthur”: