120 Mr. Lacaita [May 18, 



A rapid enumeration was then given of the minor works of 

 Dante : — the Vita Nuova ; the Convito ; the Poesie Minori ; the 

 treatise De Monarchia; the treatise De Vulgari £Jloquio ; and 

 several Latin letters. "With regard especially to his minor poems, 

 it was observed that with the exception of a few sonnets, and the 

 ode to Florence, they are modelled on the Proven9al School, and 

 are a mixture of conventional poetry and scholastic theology, which 

 would scarcely be recognised as proceeding from the same author as 

 the Commedia. 



The speaker proceeded next to the great poem, which was called 

 by Dante La Commedia, a name it preserved in many of the 

 earlier editions till the end of the fifteenth century, when the epithet 

 of " Divina " was added to it. He gave a short account of the 

 different opinions with regard to what may have suggested the idea 

 of the poem, and noticed how Fontanini supposed it had been sug- 

 gested by a novel of the day containing a description of St. Patrick's 

 well ; while Denina would assign a like honour to two French novels 

 of the 12th century ; Gingueneto the Tesoretto of Brunetto Latini ; 

 Villemain to a sermon of Gregory VII., containing the account of 

 a vision of the other world; and Cancellieri and others to the 

 Visione di Frate Alberico, whose original manuscript is still pre- 

 served in the library of the Benedictine Monastery of Monte Casino. 

 He concluded by saying, that the multiplicity of the sources from 

 which it was maintained to have been derived, went only to prove, 

 not that Dante had borrowed the idea from any previous compo- 

 sition, but that the vision was a prevailing form of the literature 

 of the time ; a form which might be said to have been chiefly 

 introduced and made popular by the spurious Gospels of the second 

 century, pretending to give an account of St. Paul's ascent to the 

 third heaven, and by the Pastor of Hermas. It was worthy of 

 remark, that Dante, when only nine years old, on seeing and admir- 

 ing Beatrice, one year younger than himself, wrote a sonnet, which 

 caused him to be favourably noticed by the contemporary poets, 

 except Dante da Maiano, who ridiculed him ; and that the form 

 that his thoughts assume, even at that very early age, is that of 

 a vision or a dream. 



After alluding to the various controversies which for five centuries 

 had been raised concerning the allegory of the poem, the speaker 

 stated that he adopted Troya. and Balbo's historical explanations of 

 most of the allegorical passages. He pointed out the absurdity of 

 the hidden anti-papal spirit supposed to run through the whole 

 poem ; a theory first hinted by Ugo Foscolo, and afterwards en- 

 larged upon by Gabriele Rossetti. He conceived that Dante was 

 strictly orthodox in his Roman Catholic tenets; and he felt no 

 hesitation in asserting that a learned theological reader might almost 

 consider the Commedia, especially the " Paradiso^' as a poetical 

 synopsis of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose 

 leading tenets were propounded throughout the poem, clothed in 



