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with infinite grace and judgment, which might perhaps appear ridiculous in any other of the living languages; but in Italian, and particularly in Dante’ s poem, it has a beautiful effect and adds great force and dignity to his style, not only because Dante knew well how to select those Latin words and phrases which bave a similitude of sound with the Tuscan, but also because no other of the Hving languages hath so much affinity with the Latin tongue as ours hath. And it is observable also that what Latin he hath spread through his poem, is ali taken from the sacred writings, in the st>ie of which he hath always endeavoured to write.
I will not pretend to say that Dante has no defects. He is justly taxed with meanness of style in some few places and blamed with having made a medley of names and fables of the heathen mytholog\- with the names and stories most venerable and holy of the Christian religion. But this fault may be extenuated if we reflect that he wrote in a time when they had no other models of good poetry but the works of the pagans, with which he was so well acquainted, that he could not avoid to fili his fancy with their thoughts and phrases. That spirit of method and geometry that hath taken possession, for more than an age, of the poetry of the principal European nations, hath been the consequence of rigid observation and exact criticism, and could not be found in the time of Dante, as he was the first great poet and great writer. Before him Italy had not produced a man worthy of immortahty, by works of genius, after the fall of the empire of our predecessors.
To these poetic faults of Dante may be added a moral one: that is the having ridiculed and satirized, with as much bitterness as Luther himself, the priests and friars and generally ali the supporters of the church in which he lived. Too many of our poets who carne after him followed his imprudent and dangerous example.
Voltaire, in his Essaj’, speaking of the Paradise /osi, says that Milton, as he was travelling through Italy in his youth, saw at Florence a comedy called Adamo, writ by one Andreine,
