uctified English poetry in the
sixteenth century. Two indeed of _gli antichi_, "the all Etruscan
three," communicated an impulse both earlier and later. Love
sonneteering, in emulation of Petrarca, began at Henry VIII.'s court.
Chaucer took the substance of "Troilus and Creseyde" and "The Knightes
Tale" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and "Teseide"; and Dryden, who never
mentions Dante, versified three stories from the "Decameron." But
Petrarch and Boccaccio were not mediaeval minds. They represent the
earlier stages of humanism and the new learning. Dante was the genuine
_homme du moyen age_, and Dante was the latest of the great revivals.
"Dante," says Carlyle, "was the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the thought
they lived by stands here in everlasting music."

The difficulty, not to say obscurity, of the "Divine Comedy"; its
allusive, elliptical style; its scholasticism and allegorical method; its
multitudinous references to local politics and the history of
thirteenth-century Italy, defied approach. Above all, its profound,
austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow
rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious
liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth.
Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.[5]
In particular, deistic France, _arbiter elegantiarum_, felt with a shiver
of repulsion,

"How grim the master was of Tuscan song."

"I estimate highly," wrote Voltaire to an Italian correspondent, "the
courage with which you have dared to say that Dante was a madman[6] and
his work a monster. . . . There are found among us and in the eighteenth
century, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupid and
barbarous." A French translation of the "Divine Comedy" had been printed
by the Abbe Grangier[7] at Paris in 1596; but Rivarol, whose "Inferno"
was published in 1783, was the first Frenchman, says Lowell, to divine
Dante's greatness. The earliest German version was Bachenschwanz's prose
translation of the "Commedia" (Leipsic, 1767-69),[8] but the German
romantic school were the first to furnish a sympathetic interpretation of
Dante to their countrymen.

Chaucer was well acquainted with the work of "the grete poet of
Florence," and drew upon him occasionally, though by no means so freely
as upon Boccaccio. Thus in "The Monkes Tale" he re-tells, in a very
inferior fashion, the tragedy of Ugolino. In "The Par