Thus immensely, in two opposite directions, was the scene of the great story extended. And the discoveries to which men's minds were turned were not only those about the geography of the world they lived in, and the way in which its continents and its seas were shaped. Their minds began to turn with a new interest to art, to learning and to the beauty of the world.
All through this great story we have seen how wonderfully Rome, in spite of perpetual changes in her government and continual fighting between the various parties trying to get the upper hand, led the world, at one time dominating all by the organisation of her Empire, at another bending the spirits of men and directing their actions by the influence of the Church.
All over Italy, for many a century, the like contentions and changes in government were frequent, and it was in the very midst of the turbulence and of the fighting of city against city that Dante, greatest of Italian poets, and among the very greatest of all time, came into fame and wrote his "Divine Comedy." He was chief magistrate of Florence in 1300, born of a family that favoured the Guelphs and married to a lady of a family very strongly disposed to the Ghibellines. So he had his full share in the troubles of the times.
COLUMBUS.
Second only to him among the poets of Italy was Petrarch, his disciple. Petrarch is famous as the inventor of the "sonnet" form of verse. He was a student of the ancient classical literature of which the very existence seems to have been almost forgotten since the inroads of the Goths.
Boccaccio, author of the Decameron, a collection of prose stories which may perhaps be regarded as the foundations of the modern novel, was a contemporary and a friend of Petrarch. Our own poet Chaucer, born a quarter of a century later, was indebted to him for some of the stories which he told in verse form. Boccaccio, even more than Petrarch, was a lover of the classical literature of Greece, of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The Renaissance