by his giant personality and sublime poetic genius could alone ennoble
any epoch he was not "a solitary phenomenon of his time but a worthy
culmination of the literary movement which, beginning shortly before
1200, produced down to 1300 such a mass of undying literature" that
subsequent generations have found in it their model and inspiration
and have never quite equalled its originality and worth.

In verification of this statement I have only to mention to you the
names of the Cid of Spain, the Arthurian Legends of England, the
Nibelungen Lied of Germany and the poems of the Meistersingers, the
Trouveres and the Troubadours. The authors of these works had been
taught to make themselves eternal as Dante says Brunetto Latini taught
him. They are proof against the alleged dumbness of the ages just
preceding Dante's. Of those times speaks Dr. Ralph Adams Cram, renowned
equally for historical study and for architectural ability: "The twelfth
was the century of magnificent endeavors and all that was great in its
successor is here in embryo not only in art but in philosophy, religion
and the conduct of life. The eleventh century is a time of aspiration
and vision, of the enunciation of new principles and of the first shock
of the contest between the old that was doomed and the new that was
destined to unprecedented victories." (The Substance of Gothic, p. 69.)

Let us now make a general survey of Dante's century and then consider
the more particular events and circumstances of his environment.

It may be a surprise to you to know that there is a book entitled The
Thirteenth, the Greatest of Centuries by Dr. James J. Walsh, in its
fifth edition with a sale of 70,000 copies. He indeed is not the only
man of letters who signalizes that century for its greatness. To confine
the quotations to two writers well known in our day, I find that Fiske