lish company," and claims his
independence--

"A te fia bello
Averti fatto parte per te stesso."[43]

Dante, by the _Divina Commedia_, was the restorer of seriousness in
literature. He was so by the magnitude and pretensions of his work, and
by the earnestness of its spirit. He first broke through the
prescription which had confined great works to the Latin, and the
faithless prejudices which, in the language of society, could see powers
fitted for no higher task than that of expressing, in curiously
diversified forms, its most ordinary feelings. But he did much more.
Literature was going astray in its tone, while growing in importance;
the _Commedia_ checked it. The Provencal and Italian poetry was, with
the exception of some pieces of political satire, almost exclusively
amatory, in the most fantastic and affected fashion. In expression, it
had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose, it was trifling;
in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it
brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased
at a high price, by intellectual distortion and moral insensibility. But
this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick II, for such it was,
was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However strange this charge
first sounds against the thirteenth century, no one can look at all
closely into its history, at least in Italy, without seeing that the
idea of infidelity--not heresy, but infidelity--was quite a familiar
one; and that, side by side with the theology of Aquinas and
Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and
opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a
profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for
its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and
enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in
safety the Latin schools, but not the free and home thoughts which found
utterance in the language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the
Italian _Commedia_ had not seized on all minds. It would have been an
evil thing for Italian, perhaps for European, literature if the siren
tales of the _Decameron_ had not been the first to occupy the ears with
the charms of a new language.

Dante's all-surveying, all-embracing mind was worthy to open the grand
procession of modern poets. He had chosen his subject in a region remote
from popular thought--too awful fo