Thou shalt relinquish everything of thee
Beloved most dearly; this that arrow is
Shot from the bow of exile first of all;
And thou shalt prove how salt a savor hath
The bread of others, and how hard a path
To climb and to descend the stranger's
stairs!

Parad. xvii. Come sa di sale! Who never wet his bread with tears, says Goethe, knows ye not, ye heavenly powers! Our nineteenth century made an idol of the noble lord who broke his heart in verse once every six months, but the fourteenth was lucky enough to produce and not to make an idol of that rarest earthly phenomenon, a man of genius who could hold heart-break at bay for twenty years, and would not let himself die till he had done his task. At the end of the Vita Nuova, his first work, Dante wrote down that remarkable aspiration that God would take him to himself after he had written of Beatrice such things as were never yet written of woman. It was literally fulfilled when the Commedia was finished, twenty-five years later. Scarce was Dante at rest in his grave when Italy felt instinctively that this was her great man.

Boccaccio tells us that in

1329 Cardinal Poggetto (du Poiet) caused Dante's treatise De Monarchia to be publicly burned at Bologna, and proposed further to dig up and burn. the bones of the poet at Ravenna, as having been a heretic; but so much opposition was roused that he thought better of it. Yet this was during the pontificate of the Frenchman, John XXII., the reproof of whose simony

Dante puts in the mouth of St. Peter, who declares his seat vacant (Parad. xxvii.), whose damnation the poet himself seems to prophesy (Inf. xi.), and against whose election he had endeavored to persuade the cardinals, in a vehement letter. In 1350 the republic of Florence voted the sum of ten golden florins to be paid by the hands of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio to Dante's daughter Beatrice, a nun in the convent of Santa Chiara at Ravenna. In 1396 Florence voted a monument, and begged in vain for the metaphorical ashes of the man of whom she had threatened to make literal cinders if she could catch him alive. In 1429 she begged again, but Ravenna, a dead city, was tenacious of the dead poet. In 1519 Michael Angelo would have, built the monument, but Leo X. refused to allow the sacred dust to be removed. Finally, in 1829, five hundred and eight years after the death of Dante, Florence got a cenotaph fairly built in Santa Croce (by Ricci), ugly beyond even the usual lot of such, with three colossal figures on it, Dante in the middle, with Italy on one side and Poesy on the other. The tomb at Ravenna, built originally in 1483, by Cardinal Bembo, was restored by Cardinal Corsi in 1692, and finally rebuilt in its present form by Cardinal Gonzaga, in 1780, all three of whom commemorated themselves in Latin inscriptions. It is a little shrine covered with a dome, not unlike the tomb of a Mohammedan saint, and is now the chief magnet which draws foreigners and

their gold to Ravenna. The valet de place says that Dante is not buried under it, but beneath the pavement of the street in front of it, where also, he says, he saw my Lord Byron kneel and weep. Like everything in Ravenna, it is dirty and neglected. In 1373 (Aug. 9) Florence instituted a chair of the Divina Commedia, and Boccaccio was named first professor. He accordingly began his lectures on Sunday, Oct. 3, following, but his comment was broken off abruptly at the seventeenth verse of the seventeenth canto of the Inferno, by the illness which ended in his death, Dec. 21, 1375. Among his successors was Filippo Villani and Filelfo. Bologna was the first to follow the example of Florence, Benvenuto da Imola having begun his lectures, according to Tiraboschi, as early as 1375. Chairs were established also at Pisa, Venice, Piacenza, and Milan before the close of the century. The lectures were delivered in the churches and on feast days, which shows their popular character. Balbo reckons (but that is guesswork) that the manuscript copies of the Divina Commedia made during the fourteenth century, and now existing in the libraries of Europe, are more numerous than those of all other works, ancient and modern, made during the same period. Between the invention of printing and the year 1500, more than twenty editions were published in Italy, the earliest in 1472. During the sixteenth century there were forty editions; during the seventeenth, a period, for Italy,

of sceptical dilettantism, only three; during the eighteenth, thirty-four; and already, during the first half of the nineteenth, at least eighty. The first translation was into Spanish, in 1428. M. St. René Taillandier says that the Commedia was condemned by the Inquisition in Spain, but this seems too general a statement, for, according to Foscolo ("Dante," Vol. IV. p. 116), it was the commentary of Landino and Vellutello, and a few verses in the Inferno and Paradiso, which were condemned. The first French translation was that of Grangier, 1596, but the study of Dante struck no root there till the present century. Rivarol, who translated the Inferno in 1783, was the first Frenchman who divined the wonderful force and vitality of the Commedia. The expressions of Voltaire. represent very well the average opinion of cultivated persons in respect of Dante in the middle of the eighteenth century. He says: "The Italians call him divine; but it is a hidden divinity; few people understand his oracles. He has commentators, which, perhaps, is another reason for his not being understood. His reputation will go on increasing, because scarce anybody reads him." (Dict. Phil., art. "Dante.") To Father Bettinelli he writes: "I estimate highly the courage with which you have dared to say that Dante was a madman and his work a monster." But he adds, what shows that Dante had his admirers even in that flippant century: "There are found among us, and in the eighteenth century, people

But

the British Isles (they boasted also of Alexander Hales and Bradwardine) Duns Scotus and William of Ockham; France alone must content herself with names somewhat inferior (she had already given Abelard, Gilbert de la Porée, Amauri de Bene, and other famous or suspected names), now William of Auvergne, at a later time Durandus. Albert and Aquinas were of noble houses, the Counts of Bollstadt and Aquino ; Bonaventura of good parentage at Fidenza; of Scotus the birth was so obscure as to be untraceable; Ockham was of humble parents in the village of that name in Surrey. France may boast that the University of Paris was the great scene of their studies, their labors, their instruction: the University of Paris was the acknowledged awarder of the fame and authority obtained by the highest Schoolmen. It is no less remarkable that the new Mendicant Orders sent forth these five Patriarchs, in dignity, of the science. Albert and Aquinas were Dominicans; Bonaventura, Duns Scotus, Ockham, Franciscans. It might have been supposed that the popularizing of religious teaching, which was the express and avowed object of the Friar Preachers and of the Minorites, would have left the higher places of abstruse and learned Theology to the older Orders, or to the more dignified secular ecclesiastics. Content with being the vigorous antagonists of heresy in all quarters, they would not aspire also to become the aristocracy of theologic erudition. But the dominant re

ligious impulse of the times could not but seize on all the fervent and powerful minds which sought satisfaction for their devout yearnings. No one who had strong religious ambition could be anything but a Dominican or a Franciscan; to be less was to be below the highest standard. Hence on one hand the Orders aspired to rule the Universities, contested the supremacy with all the great established authorities in the schools; and having already drawn into their vortex almost all who united powerful abilities with a devotional temperament, never wanted men who could enter into this dreary but highly rewarding service, - men who could rule the schools, as others of their brethren had begun to rule the Councils and the minds of kings. It may be strange to contrast the popular simple preaching for such must have been that of St. Dominic and St. Francis, such that of their followers, in order to contend with success against the plain and austere sermons of the heretics — with the Sum of Theology of Aquinas, which of itself (and it is but one volume in the works of Thomas) would, as it might seem, occupy a whole life of the most secluded study to write, almost to read. The unlearned, unreasoning, only profoundly passionately loving and dreaming St. Francis, is still more oppugnant to the intensely subtile and dry Duns Scotus, at one time carried by his severe logic into Pelagianism; or to William of Ockham, perhaps the hardest and severest intellectualist of all,-a political fanatic, not

like his visionary brethren, who brooded over the Apocalypse and their own prophets, but for the Imperial against the Papal sovereignty.

As then in these five men culminates the age of genuine Scholasticism, the rest may be left to be designated and described to posterity by the names assigned to them by their own wondering disciples.

We would change, according to our notion, the titles which discriminated this distinguished pentarchy. Albert the Great would be the Philosopher, Aquinas the Theologian, Bonaventura the Mystic, Duns Scotus the Dialectician, Ockham the Politician. It may be said of Scholasticism, as a whole, that whoever takes delight in what may be called gymnastic exercises of the reason or the reasoning powers, efforts which never had, and hardly cared to have, any bearing on the life, or even on the sentiments and opinions of mankind, may study these works, the crowning effort of Latin, of Sacerdotal, and Monastic Christianity, and may acquire something like respect for these forgotten athletes in the intellectual games of antiquity. They are not

of so much moment in the history of religion, for their theology was long before rooted in the veneration and awe of Christendom; nor in that of philosophy, for except what may be called mythological subtilties, questions relating to the world of angels and spirits, of which, according to them, we might suppose the revelation to man as full and perfect as that of God or of the Redeemer, there is hardly a question which has not been examined in other language and in less dry and syllogistic form. There is no acute observation on the workings of the human mind, no bringing to bear extraordinary facts on the mental, or mingled mental and corporeal, constitution of our being. With all their researches into the unfathomable they have fathomed nothing; with all their vast logical apparatus, they have proved nothing to the satisfaction of the inquisitive mind. Not only have they not solved any of the insoluble problems of our mental being, our primary conceptions, our relations to God, to the Infinite, neither have they (a more possible task) shown them to be insoluble.