Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 | Page 4

incense! how unselfish their salvation! how intelligible their talk about justice and love! It would be far more easy, however, for the Church of England to do this than the Church of Rome; since the former would not feel itself hampered with pretensions to infallibility. A Church once reformed, may reform itself again and again, till it remove every blemish in the way of its perfection. And God grant this may be the lot of the Church of my native country. Its beautiful old ivied places of worship would then want no harmony of accordance with its gentle and tranquil scenery; no completeness of attraction to the reflecting and the kind.
But if Charity (and by Charity I do not mean mere toleration, or any other pretended right to permit others to have eyes like ourselves, but whatever the delightful Greek word implies of good and lovely), if this truly and only divine consummation of all Christian doctrine be not thought capable of taking a form of belief "strong" enough, apart from threats that revolt alike the heart and the understanding, Superstition must look out for some new mode of dictation altogether; for the world is outgrowing the old.

I cannot, in gratitude for the facilities afforded to myself, as well as for a more obvious and public reason, dismiss this Preface without congratulating men of letters on the establishment and increasing prosperity of the London Library, an institution founded for the purpose of accommodating subscribers with such books, at their own houses, as could only be consulted hitherto at the British Museum. The sole objection to the Museum is thus done away, and the literary world has a fair prospect of possessing two book-institutions instead of one, each with its distinct claims to regard, and presenting in combination all that the student can wish; for while it is highly desirable that authors should be able to have standard works at their command, when sickness or other circumstances render it impossible for them to go to the Museum, it is undoubtedly requisite that one great collection should exist in which they are sure to find the same works unremoved, in case of necessity,--not to mention curious volumes of all sorts, manuscripts, and a world of books of reference.
[Footnote 1: "It is probable that a prose translation would give a better idea of the genius and manner of this poet than any metrical one." Vol. i. p. 310.]
[Footnote 2: Discorsi sopra la Prinza Deca di Tito Livio, lib. iii. cap. i. At p. 230 of the present volume I have too hastily called St. Dominic the "founder of the Inquisition." It is generally conceded, I believe, by candid Protestant inquirers, that he was not; whatever zeal in the foundation and support of the tribunal may have been manifested by his order. But this does not acquit him of the cruelty for which he has been praised by Dante. He joined in the sanguinary persecution of the Albigenses.]
[Footnote: 3 It is entitled, "Italy, Austria, and the Pope;" and is full, not only of the eloquence of zeal, and of evidences of intellectual power, but of the most curious and instructive information.]
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.

DANTE.
CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS
THE ITALIAN PILGRIMS PROGRESS
I. The Journey through Hell II. Purgatory. III. Heaven
PULCI.
CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS
HUMOURS OF GIANTS
THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES
APPENDIX.
I. Story of Paulo and Francesca. Translation.
II. Accounts given by different writers of the circumstances relating to Paulo and Francesca; concluding with the only facts ascertained.
III. Story of Ugolino. Translation. Real Story of Ugolino, and Chaucer's feeling respecting the Poem.
IV. Picture of Florence in the time of Dante's Ancestors. Translation.
V. The Monks and the Giants
VI. Passages in the Battle of Roncesvalles.
DANTE
Critical Notice
OF
DANTE'S LIFE AND GENIUS.[1]
Dante was a very great poet, a man of the strongest passions, a claimant of unbounded powers to lead and enlighten the world; and he lived in a semi-barbarous age, as favourable to the intensity of his imagination, as it was otherwise to the rest of his pretensions. Party zeal, and the fluctuations of moral and critical opinion, have at different periods over-rated and depreciated his memory; and if, in the following attempt to form its just estimate, I have found myself compelled, in some important respects, to differ with preceding writers, and to protest in particular against his being regarded as a proper teacher on any one point, poetry excepted, and as far as all such genius and energy cannot in some degree help being, I have not been the less sensible of the wonderful nature of that genius, while acting within the circle to which it belongs. Dante was indeed so great a poet, and at the same time exhibited in his personal character such a mortifying exception to what we conceive to be the natural wisdom and