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ging him that, as far as it lay in his power, he would exert his good offices to induce Dante to continue and finish his work.

And those friends he left behind him, his sons and his disciples, having searched at many times and for several months everything of his writing, to see whether The seven aforesaid cantos having he had left any conclusion to his work, reached the Marquis's hands, and hav- could find in nowise any of the remaining marvellously pleased him, he showed ing cantos; his friends generally being them to Dante; and having heard from much mortified that God had not at him that they were his composition, he least lent him so long to the world, that entreated him to continue the work. he might have been able to complete To this it is said that Dante answered: the small remaining part of his work; "I really supposed that these, along and having sought so long and never with many of my other writings and found it, they remained in despair. effects, were lost when my house was Jacopo and Piero were sons of Dante, plundered, and therefore I had given and each of them being rhymers, they up all thoughts of them. But since it were induced by the persuasions of their has pleased God that they should not friends to endeavour to complete, as far be lost, and He has thus restored them as they were able, their father's work, to me, I shall endeavour, as far as I am in order that it should not remain imable, to proceed with them according perfect; when to Jacopo, who was more to my first design." And recalling his eager about it than his brother, there old thoughts, and resuming his inter-appeared a wonderful vision, which not rupted work, he speaks thus in the Deginning of the eighth canto: "My wondrous history I here renew.'

only induced him to abandon such presumptuous folly, but showed him where the thirteen cantos were which were wanting to the Divina Commedia, and which they had not been able to find.

Now precisely the same story, almost without any alteration, has been related to me by a Ser Dino Perino, one of our citizens and an intelligent man, who, A worthy man of Ravenna, whose according to his own account, had been name was Pier Giardino, and who had on the most friendly and familiar terms long been Dante's disciple, grave in his with Dante; but he so far alters the manner and worthy of credit, relates story, that he says, "It was not Andrea that, after the eighth month from the Leoni, but I myself, who was sent by day of his master's death, there came to the lady to the chests for the papers, his house before dawn Jacopo di Dante, and that found these seven cantos and who told him that that night, while he took them to Dino, the son of Messer was asleep, his father Dante had ap Lambertuccio." I do not know to peared to him, clothed in the whitest which of these I ought to give most garments, and his face resplendent with credit, but whichever of them spoke the an extraordinary light; that he, Jacopo, truth, still a doubt occurs to me in what asked him if he lived, and that Dante they say, which I cannot in any manner replied: "Yes, but in the true life, not solve to my satisfaction; and my doubt our life." Then he, Jacopo, asked him is this. The poet introduces Ciacco if he had completed his work before into the sixth canto, and makes him passing into the true life, and, if he had prophesy, that before three years had done so, what had become of that part elapsed from the moment he was speak of it which was missing, which they ing, the party to which Dante belonged none of them had been able to find. should fall, and so it happened. But To this Dante seemed to answer, "Yes, we know the removal of the Bianchi I finished it ;" and then took him, from office, and their departure from Florence, all happened at once; and therefore, if the author departed at that time, how could he have written this, --and not only this, but another canto after it?

Jacopo, by the hand, and led him into that chamber in which he, Dante, had been accustomed to sleep when he lived in this life, and, touching one of the walls, he said, "What you have sought for so much, is here;" and at these

words both Dante and sleep fled from Jacopo at once. For which reason Jacopo said he could not rest without coming to explain what he had seen to Pier Giardino, in order that they should go together and search out the place thus pointed out to him, which he had retained excellently in his memory, and to see whether this had been pointed out by a true spirit, or a false delusion. For which purpose, although it was still far in the night, they set off together, and went to the house in which Dante resided at the time of his death. Having called up its present owner, he admitted them, and they went to the place thus pointed out; there they found a blind fixed to the wall, as they had always been used to see it in past days; they lifted it gently up, when they found a little window in the wall, never before seen by any of them, nor did they even know it was there. In it they found several writings, all mouldy from the dampness of the walls, and had they remained there longer, in a little while they would have crumbled away. Having thoroughly cleared away the mould, they found them to be the thirteen cantos that had been wanting to complete the Commedia.

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 Looked at outwardly, the life of Dante seat vacant (Parad. xxvii.), whose damseems to have been an utter and disas- nation the poet himself seems to pro trous failure. What its inward satis-phesy (Inf. xi.), and against whose: faction must have been, we, with the election he had endeavoured to persuade Paradiso open before us, can form some the cardinals, in a vehement letter. faint conception. To him, longing with 1350 the republic of Florence voted the an intensity which only the word Dan- sum of ten golden florins to be paid by tesque will express to realize an ideal the hands of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio upon earth, and continually baffled and to Dante's daughter Beatrice, a nun in misunderstood, the far greater part of the convent of Santa Chiara at Ravenna. his mature life must have been labour In 1396 Florence voted a monument, and sorrow. We can see how essential and begged in vain for the metaphorical all that sad experience was to him, can ashes of the man of whom she had understand why all the fairy stories hide threatened to make literal cinders if she the luck in the ugly black casket; but could catch him alive. In 1429 she to him, then and there, how seemed it? 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 reinoved.

THE POSTHUMOUS DANTE. By J. R. Lowell in the American Cyclopædia,

VI. 251.

"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 savour hath

In

1

Finally, in 1829, five hundred and eight of sceptical dilettantism, only three, years after the death of Dante, Florence during the eighteenth, thirty-four; and got a cenotaph fairly built in Santa already, during the first half of the Croce (by Ricci), ugly beyond even the nineteenth, at least eighty. The first usual lot of such, with three colossal translation was into Spanish, in 1428. figures on it, Dante in the middle, with M. St. René Taillandier says that the Italy on one side and Poesy on the Commedia was condemned by the Inother. The tomb at Ravenna, built quisition in Spain, but this seems too originally in 1483, by Cardinal Bembo, general a statement, for, according to was restored by Cardinal Corsi in 1692, Foscolo ("Dante," Vol. IV. p. 116), and finally rebuilt in its present form by it was the commentary of Landino and Cardinal Gonzaga, in 1780, all three of Vellutello, and a few verses in the In whom commemorated themselves in ferno and Paradiso, which were con Latin inscriptions. It is a little shrine demned. The first French translation covered with a dome, not unlike the was that of Grangier, 1596, but the tomb of a Mohammedan saint, and is study of Dante struck no root there till now the chief magnet which draws the present century. Rivarol, who foreigners and their gold to Ravenna. translated the Inferno in 1783, was the The valet de place says that Dante is not first Frenchman who divined the won buried under it, but beneath the pave-derful force and vitality of the Commedia. ment of the street in front of it, where The expressions of Voltaire represent also, he says, he saw my Lord Byron very well the average opinion of culti kneel and weep. Like everything in vated persons in respect of Dante in the Ravenna, it is dirty and neglected. In middle of the eighteenth century. He 1373 (Aug. 9) Florence instituted a chair says: "The Italians call him divine; of the Divina Commedia, and Boccaccio but it is a hidden divinity; few people was named first professor. He accord- understand his oracles. He has comingly began his lectures on Sunday, mentators, which, perhaps, is another Oct. 3, following, but his comment was reason for his not being understood. broken off abruptly at the seventeenth His reputation will go on increasing, verse of the seventeenth canto of the because scarce anybody reads him." Inferno, by the illness which ended in (Dict. Phil., art. "Dante.") To Father his death, Dec. 21, 1375. Among his Bettinelli he writes: "I estimate highly successors was Filippo Villani and the courage with which you have dared Filelfo. Bologna was the first to follow to say that Dante was a madman and the example of Florence, Benvenuto da his work a monster." But he adds, Imola having begun his lectures, accord- what shows that Dante had his admirers ing to Tiraboschi, as early as 1375. even in that flippant century: "There Chairs were established also at Pisa, are found among us, and in the eighteenth Venice, Piacenza, and Milan before the century, people who strive to admire close of the century. The lectures were imaginations so stupidly extravagant and delivered in the churches and on feast barbarous." (Corresp. gen., Euvres, days, which shows their popular cha- Tom. LVII. pp. So, 81.) Elsewhere racter. Balbo reckons (but that is guess- he says that the Commedia was "an odd work) that the manuscript copies of the poem, but gleaming with natural beauDivina Commedia made during the four-ties, a work in which the author rose in eenth century, and now existing in the fibraries 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,

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." (Essai sur les Maurs, Euvres, Tom. XVII., pp. 371, 372.) 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 Danta

with vague commendation, evidently from a very superficial acquaintance, and that only with the Inferno.

THE

SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY.

also of Alexander Hales and Bradwar. dine) Duns Scotus and William of Ock. ham; France alone must content herself with names somewhat inferior (she had already given Abélard, Gilbert de la Porée, Amauri de Rene, and other famous or suspected names), now Wil

From Milman's History of Latin Christianity,liam of Auvergne, at a later time Du

Book XIV. Ch. III.

It

randus. Albert and Aquinas were of Now came the great age of the noble houses, the Counts of Bollstadt Schoolmen. Latin Christianity raised up and Aquino; Bonaventura of good pathose vast monuments of Theology which rentage at Fidenza; of Scotus the birth ainaze and appall the mind with the was so obscure as to be untraceable; enormous accumulation of intellectual Ockham was of humble parents in the industry, ingenuity, and toil; but of village of that name in Surrey. But which the sole result to posterity is this France may boast that the University of barren amazement. The tomes of Scho- Paris was the great scene of their studies, lastic Divinity may be compared with their labours, their instruction: the Unithe Pyramids of Egypt, which stand in versity of Paris was the acknowledged that rude majesty which is commanding awarder of the fame and authority from the display of immense human obtained by the highest Schoolmen. power, yet oppressive from the sense of is no less remarkable that the New the waste of that power for no disco- Mendicant Orders sent forth these five verable use. Whoever penetrates within Patriarchs, in dignity, of the science. finds himself bewildered and lost in a Albert and Aquinas were Dominicans; labyrinth of small, dark, intricate pas- Bonaventura, Duns Scotus, Ockham, sages and chambers, devoid of grandeur, Franciscans. It might have been supdevoid of solemnity: he may wander posed that the popularising of religious without end, and find nothing! It was teaching, which was the express and not indeed the enforced labour of a slave avowed object of the Friar Preachers population: it was rather voluntary and of the Minorites, would have lef slavery, submitting in its intellectual am- the higher places of abstruse and learned bition and its religious patience to mon- Theology to the older Orders, or to the astic discipline: it was the work of a more dignified secular ecclesiastics. Consmall intellectual oligarchy, monks, of tent with being the vigorous antagonists necessity, in mind and habits; for it of heresy in all quarters, they would not imperiously required absolute seclusion aspire also to become the aristocracy of either in the monastery or in the univer- theologic erudition. But the dominant sity, a long life under monastic rule. religious impulse of the times could not No Schoolman could be a great man but but seize on all the fervent and powerful as a Schoolman. William of Ockham minds which sought satisfaction for their alone was a powerful demagogue-scho-devout yearnings. No one who had lastic even in his political writings, but strong religious ambition could be any still a demagogue. It is singular to see thing but a Dominican or a Franciscan; every kingdom in Latin Christendom, to be less was to be below the highest every order in the social state, furnishing standard. Hence on one hand the the great men, not merely to the succes-Orders aspired to rule the Universities, sive lines of Doctors, who assumed the splendid titles of the Angelical, the Seraphic, the Irrefragable, the most Profound, the most Subtile, the Invincible, even the Perspicuous, but to what may be called the supreme Pentarchy of Scholasticism. Italy sent Thomas of Aquino and Bonaventura Germany, Albert the Great; the British Isles (they boasted

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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 tem. perament, never wanted men who coul 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 preachingfor 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 relat

ing 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 pri mary conceptions, our relations to God, to the Infinite, neither have they (a more possible task) shown them to be insoluble.

HOMER'S ODYSSEY.

Book XI. Buckley's Translation. But when we were come down to the ship and the sea, we first of all drew the ship into the divine sea; and we placed a mast and sails in the black ship. And taking the sheep, we put them on board; and we ourselves also embarked grieving, shedding the warm tear. And fair-haired Circe, an awful goddess, possessing human speech, sent behind our dark-blue-prowed ship a moist wind that filled the sails, an excellent compa nion. And we sat down, making use of each of the instruments in the ship; and the wind and the pilot directed it. And the sails of it passing over the sea were stretched out the whole day; and the sun set, and all the ways were overshadowed. And it reached the extreme boundaries of the deep-flowing ocean; where are the people and city of the Cimmerians, covered with shadow and vapour, nor does the shining sun behold them with his beams, neither when he goes towards the starry heaven, nor when he turns back again from heaven to earth; but pernicious night is spread over hapless mortals. Having come there, we drew up our ship; and we took out the sheep; and we ourselves

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