as he was; stimulating his jaded hope with the bitter sweet of revenge, which he could wreak at will upon his enemies; and solacing a wounded spirit with the thought of fame in possession, which his fellow-citizens could not confiscate, and fame in reversion, of which contemporaries could not cut off the entail.

Yet while he is thus in every point an individual, he is at the same time an exemplar of the whole species; and he may emphatically say to the reader who can follow him in his journeys, receive his inspirations, and share in his troubles, anxieties, joys, and disappointments:"Am I not a man and a brother?" Dante, though in this sense the hero of his own poem, is any thing but a hero, either in the vulgar or the chivalrous sense of the term. He is a human being, with all the faults, frailties, and imperfections of our common nature, as they really existed in himself, and as they more or less exist in every other person; nor can a less sophisticated character be found in all the volumes of prose and rhyme that have appeared since this auto-biographical poem. He assumes nothing; he conceals nothing; his fears, his ignorance, his loves, and his enmities, are all undisguisedly set forth, as though he were all the while communing with his own heart, without the cowardly apprehension of blame, or the secret desire of applause from a fellow-creature. He is always, indeed, noble, manly, and candid, but travelling continually in company of some superior intelligence, — Virgil in hell and purgatory, and Beatrice in purgatory and heaven, he always defers to the one or the other in difficulty, doubt, or danger, and clings for protection, as well as looks up for instruction, with childlike simplicity and docility; returning with the most reverent and affectionate gratitude every token of kindness received from either.

Marvellous and incredible, it must be confessed, are many of the stories which he tells; but he tells them with the plainness and straight-forwardness of a man who is speaking the truth, and nothing else, of his own know

In the last cantos of the "Purgatorio," and throughout the "Paradiso," there is a prodigious putting forth of power to describe ineffable and eternal things; with inexhaustible prodigality of illustration, and transmutation of the same symbols, to constitute different gradations of blessedness and glory. Of these, however, there are scarcely any types except light, colour, sound, and motion, variously combined to represent spiritual beings, their forms, their occupations, and manner of discoursing ; but even amongst such inexpressible, nay, unimaginable scenes and passages, the human nature which cleaves to the poet, and shows itself, under every transmigration, allied to flesh and blood, gives an interest which allegorical pictures of invisible realities can never keep up beyond the first brilliant impression. Yet the vitality and strength of the poem reside chiefly in the first and second parts; diminishing just in proportion as the author rises above the regions which exhibit the sins and sufferings of creatures like ourselves, punished with everlasting destruction in hell, or "burnt and purged away," through the penal inflictions of purgatory. It may,

however, be said, with regard to the whole, that no ideal beings, ideal scenes, or ideal occurrences, in any poem or romance, have ever more perfectly personified truth and nature than those in this composition, which, though the theatre is figuratively beyond the limits of human action, is nevertheless full of such action in its most common as well as its most extraordinary forms.

There is scarcely a decorous attitude of the human frame, a look expressive of the most concealed sentiment, or a feeling of pain, pleasure, surprise, doubt, fear, agony, hope, delight, which is not described with a minuteness of discrimination alike curious and admirable; the poet himself frequently being the subject of the same, and exciting our sympathy by the lively or poignant remembrance of having ourselves done, looked, felt like him, when we were far from being ingenuous enough to acknowledge the weakness implied. There is scarcely a phenomenon in the visible heavens, the earth, the sea,

and the phases of nature, which he has not presented in the most striking manner. In such instances he frequently descends to the nicest particulars, that he may realise the exact view of them which he wishes to be taken; they being necessarily illustrations of invisible and preternatural subjects. This leads to the remark, that the poem abounds with similes of the greatest variety, beauty, and elegance; often, likewise, of the most familiar, touching, or grotesque character. Among these, birds are favourite images, especially the stork and the falcon, the two last that an English poet of the nineteenth century would think of, but which happily remind us, as often as they are seen here, of the country of the author, while they present pictures of times gone by, the stork having long ago deserted our shores, and falconry, poetical and captivating as it is to the eye and the fancy, having been abandoned in the fashionable rage for preserves, where game are bred like poultry, and massacred by wholesale on field-days. Next to birds, children are the darlings, in the similes, of this stern, and harsh, and gloomy being, as he is often, though unjustly, represented to have been. Amidst his most dazzling, terrific, or monstrous creations, these little ones, in all their loveliness and hilarity, are introduced, to re-invigorate the tired thoughts, and cool the over-heated imagination with reminiscence of that which, in this world, may be looked upon with the least pain, and which cannot be looked upon with pleasure without our being the better for it; the love of children, and the delight of seeing them happy, being a test of every other species of kindness towards our fellow-creatures.

It is unnecessary to pursue general criticism further. Any analysis of the plot would be preposterous here; for nothing less than a progressive abstract of the whole, with examples from every stage, would be satisfactory, or indeed intelligible, to those who are not acquainted with the original, or the translation into English by the Reverend H. F. Cary, which may be said to fail in nothing except

of the writer's attention to what constitutes the chief merit of his performance, fidelity to the meaning of the

text.

It was the purpose of the writer of the foregoing memoir to have concluded his strictures on the " Divina Commedia" with a series of newly-translated specimens from the same (like the foregoing ones), in the various kinds of style for which the author was distinguished, in order to give the English reader some faint idea of this poet's very peculiar manner of handling his subject, and the general cast of his mind and mode of thinking but the limits of the present work precluding any further extension of this article, these are reserved, and may be laid before the public at some future opportunity.

61

PETRARCH.

FRANCESCO PETRARCA was of Florentine extraction, and sprung from a respectable family. His progenitors had been notaries. His great grandfather has been distinguished for his integrity, benevolence, and long life his youth had been active, his old age was serene; he died in his sleep when more than 100 years old, an age scarcely ever heard of in Italy. His father exercised the same profession as those who had gone before him; and, being held in great esteem by his fellow citizens, he had filled several public offices. When the Ghibelines were banished Florence in 1302, Petraccolo was included in the number of exiles; his property was confiscated, and he retired with his wife, Eletta Canigiani, whom he had lately married, to the town of Arezzo in Tuscany. Two years after, the Ghibeline exiles endeavoured to reinstate themselves in their native city by force of arms, but they failed in their enterprise, and were forced to retreat. The attempt took place on the night of the 20th of July, 1304; and, on returning discomfited on the morrow, Petraccolo found that during the intervening hours his wife had, after a period of great difficulty and danger, given birth to a son. The child was baptized Francesco, and the surname of di Petracco was added, as was the custom in those days, to distinguish him as the son of Petracco. Orthography, at that time, was very inexact; and the poet's ear for harmony caused him to give a more euphonious sound to his patronymic: he wrote his name Petrarca, and by this he was known during his life, and to all posterity.

When the child was seven months old his mother 1305. was permitted to return from banishment, and she established herself at a country house belonging to