Naturæ, cœlique vias, terræque, marisque
Aonios fontes, Parnasi culmen et antra
Julia, Parisios dudum, extremosque Britannos."
Cf. Mazzinghi, A Brief Notice of Recent Researches respecting Dante (1844), quoted by Paget Toynbee, Dante in English Literature (Methuen, 1909), Vol. II, p. 696 et seq.
[590] See supra, [p. 185] et seq. As we have seen, this tirade is not altogether original, but is founded on a passage of Theophrastus, translated by Jerome, and copied out by Boccaccio. Cf. Macri Leone, Vita di Dante (Firenze, 1888).
[591] Mr. Wicksteed's translation, p. 53.
[592] On what Boccaccio has to say on Dante's pride see pp. 58 and 77 of Mr. Wicksteed's translation.
[593] He treats of the Divine Comedy more fully than of the rest. "The question is moved at large by many men, and amongst them sapient ones," he writes, "why Dante, a man perfectly versed in knowledge, chose to write in the Florentine idiom so grand a work, of such exalted matter and so notable as this comedy; and why not rather in Latin verses, as other poets before him had done. In reply to which question, two chief reasons, amongst many others, come to my mind. The first of which is that he might be of more general use to his fellow-citizens and the other Italians; for he knew that if he had written metrically in Latin, as the other poets of past times had done, he would only have done service to men of letters, whereas writing in the vernacular he did a deed ne'er done before, and (without any let to men of letters whereby they should not understand him) showing the beauty of our idiom and his own excelling art therein, gave delight and understanding of himself to the unlearned, who had hitherto been abandoned of every one. The second reason which moved him thereto was this: seeing that liberal studies were utterly abandoned, and especially by the princes and other great men, to whom poetic toils were wont to be dedicated (wherefore the divine works of Virgil and the other poets had not only sunk into neglect, but well nigh into contempt at the hands of many), having himself begun, according as the loftiness of the matter demanded, after this guise—
"Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo,
Spiritibus que lata patent que premia solvunt