But of all the influences on Italian art in that wonderful fourteenth century, Dante was the greatest.

Your Dante and Sandys' Ovid are the only helpmates of translations.

Dante was very bad company, and was never invited to dinner.

The souls here, as in former circles, knew Dante to be a living creature by the shadow which he cast; and after the wonted explanations, he learned who some of them were.

Scholars find Greece completely prefigured in Homer, and the time may come when Dante and Tasso shall be the leading authorities for the history of the Middle Ages, and Milton for that of the ages of Protestantism.

Norden, therefore, seems to go too far in giving this as an example of contamination of poetic by rhetoric.[80] Dante remains an excellent poet when he puts into the mouth of Virgil that persuasive speech to Cato in the first canto of the Purgatorio.

Dante is the eye-witness and ear-witness of that which he relates.

Dante was not so close an observer of human nature as Shakspeare, nor so great a painter of human actions as Homer, nor so learned a scholar as Milton; but his soul was more serious than either,he was deeper, more intense than they; while in pathos, in earnestness, and in fiery emphasis he has been surpassed only by Hebrew poets and prophets.

Dante became his worship, and his own spirit responded to that of the author of the "Divina Commedia.

" The Pagans could not be rebels to a law they never heard of, any more than Dante could be a rebel to Luther.

Dante was not the man to give and take in such matters on equal terms; and hence he is at one time in a palace, and at another in a solitude.

DANTE, for instance, is a most prolific fount of quotations, especially for those who do not know the original Italian.

Dante himself was a native of Florence, Italy, and lived from 1265 to 1321.

Dante was a very curious inquirer on all subjects, and evidently acquainted with ships and seamen as well as geography; and his imagination would eagerly have seized a magnificent novelty like this, and used it the first opportunity.

Cimabue, of whom, I may say, almost nothing definite is known, and upon whom the delightful but casual old Vasari is the earliest authority, as Dante was his first eulogist, carried on the Byzantine tradition, but breathed a little life into it.

Lord Derby's translation of the Iliad also charmed me with its stateliness and melody, and Dante was another favorite study.

Dante was his friend and Titian copied him....