Most sincerely yours,
Seymour Kirkup.
Best remembrances to Sig. Carlo (Eastlake, his name in Rome).
The name of the bearer of the portrait is Plowden. He is a banker of Florence, and may be heard of at Messrs Harris & Farquhar, Bankers, of London. He will send it you, I hope, or leave it himself.
C.
Florence, 5th February 1843.
My dear Friend,
Let me add my thanks to the rest of the world for the mental enjoyment afforded by your Beatrice. My share is the greater for the handsome and honourable mention you make of me. I am proud of your approbation and good opinion, and am doubly grateful for the rank in your esteem which you have so generously bestowed on me. The book has met with unusual success here. It has converted many. Whether the name has attracted the public, or the compactness has excited the idle, or the cheapness the economic, or all together, I know not, but it has been much read and admired. Italians and Tramontani are all full of it. I think in general they are grateful for the light; although it destroys a romantic illusion, which has been much cherished, especially on this spot, but which they cannot now entertain, except at the expense of adhering to an absurdity, or rather many absurdities. Some, however, are too far committed, and have too much vanity to acknowledge themselves wrong—the vulgar and the selfish in particular.
For my own part, I have found the Ragionamento in part a renewal and condensation of what I had already learned from your former works, divided and spread through them. In this first Ragionamento you have not given the demonstration (I suppose it will follow in a succeeding one) of Boccaccio’s fault respecting May-Day, which is so complete and curious in the Misteri Platonici....
The most important of your decisions is confirmed and strengthened in this volume: I mean your identification of Beatrice and Filosofia. Your three reasons at the top of p. 20 are new and unanswerable. How completely Dante blindfolds the superficial reader (which I was, till you taught me to fathom him) by making one believe that the lady at the window was mundane philosophy, and that Beatrice, or Divine Science, reproaches Dante in Purgatory for having yielded to her attractions for a short time....