and more
or less throughout all Europe for over three centuries to follow.

Another sign of the coming of a new and more vigorous era is to be seen
in the beginning of exploration down the Atlantic coast of Africa by the
Portuguese, and their discovery and settlement of the Canary Isles. As a
first product of their voyages the explorers introduced negro slavery
into Europe[37]--a grim hint that the next age with increasing power was
to face increasing responsibilities as well.

An even greater change was coming, was already glimmering into light. In
that same year of King Charles' Pragmatic Sanction (1438), though yet
unknown to warring princes and wrangling churchmen, John Gutenberg, in a
little German workshop, had evolved the idea of movable type, that is,
of modern printing. From his press sprang the two great modern genii,
education and publicity, which have already made tyrannies and slaveries
impossible, pragmatic sanctions unnecessary, and which may one day do as
much for standing armies.

DANTE COMPOSES THE "DIVINA COMMEDIA"

A.D. 1300-1318

RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH

Out of what may be called the civil and religious
storm-and-stress period through which the Middle passed into
the modern age, there came a great literary foregleam of the
new life upon which the world was about to enter. From
Italy, where the European ferment, both in its political and
its spiritual character, mainly centred, came the prophecy
of the new day, in a poet's "vision of the invisible
world"--Dante's _Divina Commedia_--wherein also the deeper
history of the visible world of man was both embodied from
the past and in a measure predetermined for the human race.

Dante's great epic was called by him a comedy because its
ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it
the epithet "divine." It is in three parts--_Inferno_
(hell), _Purgatorio_ (purgatory), and _Paradiso_ (paradise).
It has been made accessible to English readers in the
metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and
others, and in the excellent prose version (_Inferno_) of
John Aitken Carlyle, brother of Thomas Carlyle.

Dante (originally Durante) Alighieri was born at Florence in
May, 1265, and died at Ravenna September 14, 1321. Both the
_Divina Commedia_ and his other great work, the _Vita Nuova_
(the new life), narrate the love--either romantic or
passionate--with which he was inspired b