524 Count A. de Bosdari [March 1, 



people, and we must admit that no one better than he was entitled 

 to make an exception in his own favour. These discourses are 

 the finest specimens of this sort of achievement. You will see 

 there how the Italian language, as soon as it was fit for literature, 

 arose through Dante to a greatness unequalled since. The birth of 

 Dante and the death of Ariosto are called there the sunshine and the 

 sunset of the glorious day of Italian revival ; and Dante is described 

 as looking on the Itahan culture like a giant arising between 

 St. Thomas and St. Bonaventura, at the time when all the beautiful 

 cathedrals of Italy were being erected (never to be completed after- 

 wards), and when the timid colours of art were still waiting for a 

 great painter. Further on we shall be taught why such a great differ- 

 ence exists between the poetry of Dante and his successors ; and how 

 the Divine Comedy remained as a solitary monument in which no one 

 dares to inhabit, or build other edifices on it. According to our 

 Master, if Dante had lived a little earlier, perhaps a century earlier, 

 he would have created an ideal religious literature more civil than the 

 one which in later days belonged to Catholic Spain, and more practical 

 than the one Germany has seen in our days. Coming down to the 

 Renaissance, Carducci points out that the Popes of this time were 

 unworthy of the invective of St. Peter in the Paradise ; and, 

 reminding us that the great poem had been begun in Latin verses (a 

 hard task which was abandoned at once), he wonders how, a few 

 centuries later, a movement could be started again towards the 

 classical antiquity which Dante could have been thought to have 

 stopped for ever. This study of the great models of antiquity was 

 instrumental to transform into a national literature what was in 

 Dante strictly Tuscan. And what could be the efficiency of the 

 religious principles in Italy, if the efficiency of the Divine Comedy 

 had been nil ? Carducci gives us a formula of the Italian thoughts 

 which were developed for centuries around the Roman Catholic 

 religion, and which are quite identical in writers so deeply different 

 from Dante. 



As for the Italian language, Dante had already noticed and described 

 the tendencies that came into effect only much later, by distinguishing 

 the noble language from the vulgar; but only in the 16th century the 

 rules of the language which Dante had created could be established, 

 and witli the realisation of all his theories the edifice of the 

 national literature was completed. It was then that Italy appeared 

 for the last time in its character of the intellectual capital of 

 Europe ; and as she had given to middle age . the foremost 

 Cliristian poet, she gave at the end of the Renaissance its only 

 real heir in Torquato Tasso. 



He, too, thinks and believes through his philosophy ; he loves 

 and explains his love through his doctrine. He is an artist, and 

 writes dialogues of scholastic specuilations, which aspire at bein.ij: 

 platonic. And, as Dante himself, he has always something to 



