Eminent literary and scientific men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Vol. 1 (of 3)

—— 'Tis the doom Of spirits of my order to be rack'd In life; to wear their hearts out, and consume Their days in endless strife, and die alone: —Then future thousands crowd around their tomb, And pilgrims come from climes where they have known The name of Him,—who now is but a name; And wasting homage o'er the sullen stone, Spread his, by him unheard, unheeded, fame.
LORD BYRON's Prophecy of Dante , Canto I.
Among the illustrious fathers of song who, in their own land, cannot cease to exercise dominion over the minds, characters, and destinies of all posterity,—and who, beyond its frontiers, must continue to influence the taste, and help to form the genius, of those who shall exercise like authority in other countries,—Dante Alighieri is, undoubtedly, one of the most remarkable.
This poet was descended from a very ancient stock, which, according to Boccaccio, traced its lineage to the Roman house of Frangipani,—one of whose members, surnamed Eliseo, was said to have been an early settler, if not a principal founder, of the restored city of Florence, in the reign of Charlemagne, after it had lain desolate for several centuries, subsequently to its destruction by Attila the Hun. From this Eliseo sprang a family, of which Dante gives, in the fifteenth and sixteenth cantos of his Paradiso, such information, as he thought proper; making Cacciaguida (one of its most distinguished chiefs, who fell fighting in the crusade under the emperor Conrad III.,) say, rather ambiguously, of those who went before him, that who they were, and whence they came, it is more honest to keep silence than to tell, —probably, however, intending no more than to disclaim vain boasting, but not by any means to disparage his progenitors, for whom, in the fifteenth canto of the Inferno, he seems to claim the glory of having been of Roman descent, and fathers of Florence. Cacciaguida, having married a noble lady of Ferrara, gave to one of his sons by her the name of Aldighieri (afterwards softened to Alighieri), in honour of his consort. This Alighieri was the grandfather of Dante; and concerning him, Cacciaguida, in the last-mentioned canto, informs the poet, that, for some unnamed offence, his spirit has been more than a hundred years pacing round the first circle of the mountain of purgatory; adding,—