education, and division of land. His legal code, and foundation of the University of Oxford, claim the gratitude of all posterity. The Norman William brought the comparative refinement of a more temperate and polished people to compensate ultimately for his conquest, and to extenuate the memory of his oppression. He was not content, however, with conquering our country; he strove to annihilate its language. Norman-French was the language of politeness, of law, and of education; and for three hundred years the common Saxon, the vernacular language of the country, was prohibited from being taught in the schools. Hence, during that long period, there was positively nothing done towards laying the basis of a national literature. There had been stately ceremonial, gorgeous pageants, heroic or mock-heroic chivalry, courtly minstrelsy, enthusiastic superstition, rude pantomimic shows; still the mind, the national mind, slumbered. At the latter part of the thirteenth century there was great darkness over the whole of Europe; but we from our insular position, and from our being a conquered country, ruled by foreign princes, were less advanced in education and literature than either France or Italy. It is memorable, however, that then in all countries, various enthusiasms had declined. Chivalry had become a name, an order, but it was not a vital reality. The crusades had ceased, and a reaction in which people wondered at the excitement of the past followed. Some institutions of the church, which had subsisted for ages, were keenly felt as an oppression even by those whose tongues were silent. Monachism had continued from the sixth century; but now, while its hold was strong on the fears of the people, its influence on their affections had declined. Thought was moving, but yet very slowly, for ignorance checked its progress. A greater event for Europe than any battle. however glorious, or the reign of any sovereign however splendid, was the birth of the poet Dante, the illustrious Florentine, in 1265. This great man was born at a time when Italy was torn by contending factions, and when the church rather fomented than quieted the contest. He was completely mixed up in the politics of the time; his personal sorrows aggravating the susceptibility of his temper. Very early in life he formed an enthusiastic attachment for Beatrice Portinari, whose early death cast a gloom over his mind from which he never recovered. His subsequent marriage to Gemma Donati is asserted, but on very slight grounds, to have been unhappy; certain it is, his wife's family were of different opinions to himself on politics, and ultimately became his enemies. Equally fearless and melancholy, the great yet gloomy genius of Dante was destined to exert a mighty influence, not merely on Italy, but on Europe. We shall best understand the effect of Dante's writings on his own immediate time if we put a supposititious case. Imagine a mighty poet of our own age writing a poem, that told us of the eternal destiny of great and well-known persons recently deceased; that denounced their vices, and showed with terrible distinctness how, in the regions of punishment, they were being tormented; that uttered, like an accusing angel, admonitions and threatenings to the living; that revealed to the awe-struck gaze the invisible world, and, instead of thronging it with angels and demons, gave it a grand and terrible human interest by peopling it with well-known earthly beings. With all our freedom of the press, and our independence of thought, the man who ventured to do that even now, would be feared, hated, persecuted. We should forget the value of the lesson, and think only of the sternness of the teacher. In the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth, when popes and potentates ruled over mind and body, we may feebly imagine the electric power of the voice that seemed to come up from the bottomless pit, charged with the wailings of the sad, and the warnings of the tortured. Hitherto poets had sung love strains and war songs, mingling such gentle satire as stimulated, rather than offended. Now, there was a bard with another message. As a piece of merely human composition and secular writing, there had been nothing presented to the world so original, daring, and awful, as the DIVINA COMEDIA (or the epic of the DIVINE JUSTICE) of Dante. It is impossible in a sketch to give any idea of a work that attempts to describe the unseen world with awful minuteness. In accordance with the theology of the time he describes three states: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Every image that can fill up the terrible is used to describe the state of the lost. The inscription on the gates of hell prepares the mind for the horrible scenes he describes in its various gradations of woe: "Through me you pass into the city of woe: ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER HERE." It was not to be expected that this great man, and sublime genius, so beyond his age, would escape persecution. He was condemned to exile, and sentenced to be burnt alive if he returned to Florence. He never did return, but wandered heart-broken for many years in different lands. He says most affectingly, "It pleased the citizens of the fairest and most renowned daughter of Rome-Florence-to cast me out of her most sweet bosom, where I was born and bred, and passed half of the life of man; and in which, with her good leave, I still desire with all my heart to repose my weary spirit, and finish the days allotted me: and so I have wandered in almost every place to which our language extends, a stranger, almost a beggar, exposing, against my will, the wounds given me by fortune, too often unjustly imputed to the sufferer's fault. Truly, I have been a vessel without sail, and without rudder, driven about upon different shores by the dry wind that springs of dolorous poverty; and hence have I appeared vile in the eyes of many." Subsequently, he might have returned to his beloved Florence, if he would have compromised his principles. 66 No, father," he writes to a friendly ecclesiastic who had communicated the offer, "this is not the way that shall lead me back to my country. I shall return with hasty steps if you, or any other, can open a way that shall not derogate from the honour of Dante. But if by no such way Florence can be entered, then Florence I shall never enter. What! shall I not every where enjoy the sight of the sun and stars? and may I not contemplate, in every corner of the earth under the canopy of heaven, consoling and delightful truth, without first rendering myself C |