. This was amplified in his
later work, "The Literature of Europe" (1838-39). Hallam said that Dante
was the first name in the literature of the Middle Ages, the creator of
his nation's poetry, and the most original of all writers, and the most
concise. But he blamed him for obscurity, forced and unnatural turns of
expression, and barbarous licenses of idiom. The "Paradise" seemed to
him tedious, as a whole, and much of the "Purgatory" heavy. Hallam
repeated, if he did not originate that nice bit of discernment, that in
his "Paradise" Dante uses only three leading ideas--light, music, and
motion. Then came Macaulay's essay "Milton," in the _Edinburgh_ for
1825, with the celebrated parallel between the "Divine Comedy" and the
"Paradise Lost," and the contrast between Dante's "picturesque" and
Milton's "imaginative" method. Macaulay's analysis has been questioned
by Ruskin and others; some of his positions were perhaps mistaken, but
they were the most advanced that English Dante criticism had as yet taken
up. And finally came Carlyle's vivid piece of portrait painting in "Hero
Worship" (1841). The first literal prose translation of any extent from
the "Commedia" was the "Inferno" by Carlyle's brother John (1849).

Since the middle of the century Dante study and Dante literature in
English-speaking lands have waxed enormously. Dante societies have been
founded in England and America. Almost every year sees another edition,
a new commentary or a fresh translation in prose, in blank verse, in
_terza rima_, or in some form of stanza. It is not exaggerating to say
that there is more public mention of Dante now in a single year than in
all the years of the eighteenth century together. It would be
interesting, if it were possible, to count the times that Dante's name
occurs in English writings of the eighteenth and then of the nineteenth
century; afterwards to do the same with Ariosto and Tasso and compare the
results. It would be found that, while the eighteenth century set no
very high value on Ariosto and Tasso, it ignored Dante altogether; and
that the nineteenth has put aside the superficial mediaevalism of the
Renaissance romancers and gone back to the great religious romancer of
the Italian Middle Age. There is no surer plummet than Dante's to sound
the spiritual depth of a time. It is in the nineteenth century first
that Shakspere and Dante took possession of the European mind. In 1800
Shakspere was an En