Dante, an essay by the late Dean Church, is the work of a learned
and sympathetic scholar, and is an excellent treatise on the
life, times, and work of the poet.

The Notes and Illustrations that accompany Mr. Longfellow's
translation of the Divine Comedy form an admirable body of
comment on the poem.

The Rev. Dr. Edward Moore's little volume, on The Time-References
in the Divina Cominedia (London, 1887), is of great value in
making the progress of Dante's journey clear, and in showing
Dante's scrupulous consistency of statement. Dr. Moore's more
recent work, Contributions to the Textual Criticism of the Divina
Commedia (Cambridge, 1889), is to be warmly commended to the
advanced student.

These sources of information are enough for the mere English
reader. But one who desires to make himself a thorough master of
the poem must turn to foreign sources of instruction: to Carl
Witte's invaluable Dante-Forschungen (2 vols. Halle, 1869); to
the comment, especially that on the Paradiso, which accompanies
the German translation of the Divine Comedy by Philalethes. the
late King John of Saxony; to Bartoli's life of Dante in his
Storia della Letteratura Italiana (Firenze, 1878 and subsequent
years), and to Scartazzini's Prolegomeni della Divina Commedia
(Leipzig, 1890). The fourteenth century Comments, especially
those of Boccaccio, of Buti, and of Benvenuto da Imola, are
indispensable to one who would understand the poem as it was
understood by Dante's immediate contemporaries and successors. It
is from them and from the Chronicle of Dante's contemporary and