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 temper of great poets; in
other words, he was such a bigoted and exasperated man, and sullied
his imagination with so much that is contradictory to good feeling, in
matters divine as well as human; that I should not have thought myself
justified in assisting, however humbly, to extend the influence of his
writings, had I not believed a time to have arrived, when the community