e, and the literary historians of Italy are even now disputing
respecting the origin of this poem, singular in its nature and in its
excellence. In ascertaining a point so long inquired after, and so
keenly disputed, it will rather increase our admiration than detract
from the genius of this great poet; and it will illustrate the useful
principle, that every great genius is influenced by the objects and the
feelings which occupy his own times, only differing from the race of his
brothers by the magical force of his developments: the light he sends
forth over the world he often catches from the faint and unobserved
spark which would die away and turn to nothing in another hand.

The _Divina Commedia_ of Dante is a visionary journey through the three
realms of the after-life existence; and though, in the classical ardour
of our poetical pilgrim, he allows his conductor to be a Pagan, the
scenes are those of monkish imagination. The invention of a VISION was
the usual vehicle for religious instruction in his age; it was adapted
to the genius of the sleeping Homer of a monastery, and to the
comprehension, and even to the faith of the populace, whose minds were
then awake to these awful themes.

The mode of writing visions has been imperfectly detected by several
modern inquirers. It got into the Fabliaux of the Jongleurs, or
Provencal bards, before the days of Dante; they had these visions or
pilgrimages to Hell; the adventures were no doubt solemn to them--but it
seemed absurd to attribute the origin of a sublime poem to such
inferior, and to us even ludicrous, inventions. Every one, therefore,
found out some other origin of Dante's Inferno--since they were resolved
to have one--in other works more congenial to its nature; the
description of a second life, the melancholy or the glorified scenes of
punishment or bliss, with the animated shades of men who were no more,
had been opened to the Italian bard by his favourite Virgil, and might
have been suggested, according to Warton, by the _Somnium Scipionis_ of
Cicero.

But the entire work of Dante is Gothic; it is a picture of his times, of
his own ideas, of the people about him; nothing of classical antiquity
resembles it; and although the name of Virgil is introduced into a
Christian Hades, it is assuredly not the Roman, for Dante's Virgil
speaks and acts as the Latin poet could never have done. It is one of
the absurdities of Dante, who, like our Shakspeare, or like Goth