[679] Cf. A. d’Ancona, I Precursori di Dante (Florence, 1874); M. Dods, Forerunners of Dante (Edinburgh, 1903); A. J. Butler, Forerunners of Dante (Oxford, 1910); Hettinger, Göttliche Komödie, p. 79 (2nd ed., Freiburg im Breisgau, 1889). Mussafia, “Monumenti antichi di dialetti italiani,” Sitzungsber. philos. hist. Classe (Vienna Academy), vol. 45, 1864, p. 136 sqq., gives two old Italian descriptions, one of the heavenly Jerusalem, the other of the infernal Babylon.
[680] 2 Cor. xii. 2; Paradiso, i. 73-75.
[681] Ante, Chapter XIX.
[682] Ante, pp. 98-100.
[683] The coarseness of Inf. xxi. 137-139 is of a piece with the way of mediaeval art in making demons horrible through a grotesquely indecent rendering of their persons.
[684] e.g. Inf. xviii. 100 sqq.; and Inf. xxviii. and xxix.
[685] Inf. viii. 37 sqq.; xxxii. 97 sqq.; xxxiii. 116 and 149.
[686] Cf. Moore, Dante Studies, vol. ii. pp. 266-267.
[687] Any one who looks through the first volume of Tiraboschi’s great Storia della letteratura italiana, written in the early part of the nineteenth century, will find a generous acceptance of myth as fact; just as he would find the same in the Histoire ancienne of the good Rollin, written a century or more before.
[688] Dante has frequently been spoken of as the “first scholar” of his time. I do not myself know enough regarding the scholarship of every scholar in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to confirm or deny this. Personally, I do not regard him as a Titanic scholar, like Albertus Magnus for example. He studied all the classic Latin authors available. Doubtless he had a memory corresponding to his other extraordinary powers. His also was the intellectual point of view, and the intellectual interest in knowledge and its deductions. His view of life was as intellectual as that of Aquinas. But as Dante’s powers of plastic visualization were unequalled, so also, it seems to me, were his faculties of using as a poet what he had acquired as a scholar. Regarding the extent of Dante’s use and reading of the Classics, nothing could be added to Dr. Moore’s Studies in Dante, First Series; though I think what Dr. Moore has to say of “Dante and Aristotle” would have cast a more direct light upon the matter, had he cited as far as possible from the Latin translation probably used by Dante, instead of from the original Greek.