nours almost divine to the exile. The
Florentines, having in vain and frequently attempted to recover his
body, crowned his image in a church,[603] and his picture is still one
of the idols of their cathedral. They struck medals, they raised statues
to him. The cities of Italy, not being able to dispute about his own
birth, contended for that of his great poem, and the Florentines thought
it for their honour to prove that he had finished the seventh Canto
before they drove him from his native city. Fifty-one years after his
death, they endowed a professorial chair for the expounding of his
verses, and Boccaccio was appointed to this patriotic employment. The
example was imitated by Bologna and Pisa, and the commentators, if they
performed but little service to literature, augmented the veneration
which beheld a sacred or moral allegory in all the images of his mystic
muse. His birth and his infancy were discovered to have been
distinguished above those of ordinary men: the author of the
_Decameron_, his earliest biographer, relates that his mother was warned
in a dream of the importance of her pregnancy: and it was found, by
others, that at ten years of age he had manifested his precocious
passion for that wisdom or theology, which, under the name of Beatrice,
had been mistaken for a substantial mistress. When the _Divine Comedy_
had been recognised as a mere mortal production, and at the distance of
two centuries, when criticism and competition had sobered the judgment
of the Italians, Dante was seriously declared superior to Homer;[604]
and though the preference appeared to some casuists "an heretical
blasphemy worthy of the flames," the contest was vigorously maintained
for nearly fifty years. In later times it was made a question which of
the Lords of Verona could boast of having patronised him,[605] and the
jealous scepticism of one writer would not allow Ravenna the undoubted
possession of his bones. Even the critical Tiraboschi was inclined to
believe that the poet had foreseen and foretold one of the discoveries
of Galileo.--Like the great originals of other nations, his popularity
has not always maintained the same level. The last age seemed inclined
to undervalue him as a model and a study: and Bettinelli one day rebuked
his pupil Monti, for poring over the harsh and obsolete extravagances of
the _Commedia_. The present generation having recovered from the Gallic
idolatries of Cesarotti, has returned to the anci