Among My Books, Second Series | Page 8

whom she had threatened to make literal cinders if
she could catch him alive. In 1429[43] she begged again, but Ravenna,
a dead city, was tenacious of the dead poet. In 1519 Michel 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 (August 9) Florence instituted a chair of the Divina Commedia,
and Boccaccio was named first professor. He accordingly began his
lectures on Sunday, October 3, following, but his comment was broken
off abruptly at the 17th verse of the 17th canto of the Inferno by the
illness which ended in his death, December 21, 1375. Among his
successors were Filippo Villani and Filelfo. Bologna was the first to
follow the example of Florence, Benvenuto da Imola having begun his
lectures, according to Tiraboschi, so 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
this is guess-work) that the MS. 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
dilettanteism,--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.[44] 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,[45] 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.[46] 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."[47] 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 who strive to admire
imaginations so stupidly extravagant and barbarous."[48] Elsewhere he
says that the Commedia was "an odd poem, but gleaming with natural
beauties, a work in which the author rose in parts above the bad taste of
his age and his subject, and full of passages written as purely as if they
had been of the time of Ariosto and Tasso."[49] It is curious to see this
antipathetic fascination which Dante exercised over a nature so
opposite to his own.
At the beginning of this century Châteaubriand speaks of Dante with
vague commendation, evidently from a very superficial acquaintance,
and that only with the Inferno, probably from Rivarol's version.[50]
Since then there have been four or five French versions in prose or
verse, including one by Lamennais. But the austerity of Dante will not
condescend to the conventional elegance which makes the charm of

French, and the most