ssion for Beatrice pierces
through the veil of allegory which surrounds her. But the memory of his
injuries pursues him into the immensity of eternal light; and, in the
company of saints and angels, his unforgiving spirit darkens at the name
of Florence.[880]

This great poem was received in Italy with that enthusiastic admiration
which attaches itself to works of genius only in ages too rude to listen
to the envy of competitors, or the fastidiousness of critics. Almost
every library in that country contains manuscript copies of the Divine
Comedy, and an account of those who have abridged or commented upon it
would swell to a volume. It was thrice printed in the year 1472, and at
least nine times within the fifteenth century. The city of Florence in
1373, with a magnanimity which almost redeems her original injustice,
appointed a public professor to read lectures upon Dante; and it was
hardly less honourable to the poet's memory that the first person
selected for this office was Boccaccio. The universities of Pisa and
Piacenza imitated this example; but it is probable that Dante's abstruse
philosophy was often more regarded in their chairs than his higher
excellences.[881] Italy indeed, and all Europe, had reason to be proud
of such a master. Since Claudian, there had been seen for nine hundred
years no considerable body of poetry, except the Spanish poem of the
Cid, of which no one had heard beyond the peninsula, that could be said
to pass mediocrity; and we must go much further back than Claudian to
find any one capable of being compared with Dante. His appearance made
an epoch in the intellectual history of modern nations, and banished the
discouraging suspicion which long ages of lethargy tended to excite,
that nature had exhausted her fertility in the great poets of Greece and
Rome. It was as if, at some of the ancient games, a stranger had
appeared upon the plain, and thrown his quoit among the marks of former
casts which tradition had ascribed to the demigods. But the admiration
of Dante, though it gave a general impulse to the human mind, did not
produce imitators. I am unaware at least of any writer, in whatever
language, who can be said to have followed the steps of Dante: I mean
not so much in his subject as in the character of his genius and style.
His orbit is still all his own, and the track of his wheels can never be
confounded with that of a rival.[882]

[Sidenote: Petrarch.]

In the same year that Da