778 
POETRY. 
excufe for the farcafms, which, had they been in profe, 
could never have been pardoned. Ladies not only were 
judges of poefy, but fometimes entered the lifts themfelves; 
and, as the poetry of the Troubadours owed its whole 
merit to the fpontaneous flow of the foul, it may eafily 
be imagined that the more fentimental fex excelled in an 
art which, with them, was nature. 
The Troubadours frequently had their compofitions 
fung by their jongleurs. The latter, who were of an 
order quite fubaltern to the former, profefled to amufe 
the focieties to which they were admitted, by their tales, 
by the verfes which they had learned by heart, and which 
they accompanied with divers inftruments, by Height of 
hand, grimaces, and buffoonery. In this degraded ftate, 
however, they learned to compofe verfes in imitation of 
thofe which they recited from memory. Thus the cor¬ 
ruption and mean condition of the jongleurs, who in 
embracing the profeflion alfumed the name of Trouba¬ 
dours, contributed more than any other caufe to vilify 
the order. 
The remains of Troubadour minftrelfy furnilhes fome 
very beautiful thoughts and interefting tales, mixed 
with occafional Iketches of character, but with affeftation 
and bombaft in the extremeft degree. It may be remark¬ 
ed, that in thefe poems we trace l'everal very fevere attacks 
on the church of Rome. The monk felt the lalh of the 
poet in every climate long before reafon dared to open 
her mouth in the fame caufe. In Gafcony, Provence, 
Languedoc, at Piedmont, in Spain, from Figueras to the 
kingdom of Murcia, and in Sardinia and the Balearic Ifles, 
the Romance language, according to Sifmondi, ftill lives, 
though varioufly corrupted. 
The Trouveres, or Trouveurs, were the minftrels of Nor¬ 
mandy. But we have to regret that, whilft the liiftory of 
almoft every Troubadour has been written, fcarcely a 
name or a record of the Trouveres has reached our 
times. 
The Trouveres have left us chivalrous romances and 
fabliaux; the firft of which are the boaft and honour of 
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The fabliaux, 
ftories of love, and fometimes of humour, furnilhed Boc¬ 
caccio and Ariofto with many incidents, and Dante with 
his fineft allegories. 
The romances which were written by, or fprang from 
the writings of, the minftrel poets, are of three kinds. 
The firft; clafs embrace the adventures of King Arthur 
of England; the fecond, Amadis de Gaul, and a variety 
fo conftituted ; the third the adventures of Charlemagne 
and his knights: all tl^efe diverging into a multitude of 
other and minor divifiops. 
Italian Poetry. —Deriving from the troubadours and 
romantic legends, incidents, narratives, and images, and 
efpecially from the ancient poets powers of verfification 
and extended knowledge, Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, 
firft compofed regular and finifhed poems in the Italian 
tongue. 
Dante was a genius. He had powers of invention of 
the higheft order, and a fublimity of thought which 
enabled him to aggrandife the grofieft materials. He 
was, as Mr. Godwin truly fays, “ one of thofe who in the 
whole feries of human exiftence moft baffle all calculation, 
and excite unbounded aftonifhment. Dark as was the 
age in which he ftudied and wrote, unfixed and fluctuating 
as were the then half-formed languages of modern nations, 
he' trampled upon thefe difadvantages, and prefents us 
with fallies of imagination and energies of compofition, 
which no paft age of literature has excelled, and no future 
can ever hope to excel. His fatire is as biting, his fublime 
as wonderful, his tragic narratives as deep and diftrefling, 
as any which the age of Pericles or of Virgil could boaft. 
His grand poem embraces the whole compafs of human 
invention. He has thought proper to render it the re¬ 
ceptacle of all his animofities and averfions. No author 
has exhibited craft and impofture and tyranny and hard- 
lieartednefs in bolder and more glowing colours than 
Dante. . No poet has fhowed himfelf a greater mafter of 
the terrible, of all which makes the flefh of man creep on 
his bones, and perfuades us for the moment to regard 
exiftence, and confcioufnefs, and the condition of human 
beings, with loathing abhorrence. Dante exhibits 
powers, of which we did not before know that the heart 
of man was fufceptible, and which teach us to confider 
our nature as fomething greater and more aftonifhing than 
we had ever been accuflomed to conceive it.” Godwin’s 
Life of Chaucer. 
The myfteries of religion were in his time the objects 
of chief intereft and importance. The pains and plea- 
fures of an hereafter, from being matters of fpeculation 
or defcription, became the fubjefts of public repre- 
fentations; and diflertations, abounding in all the abufes 
of perverted learning, detailed the pain of every torment 
and the glory of every recompenfe. The plan of Dante’s 
poem may be traced to one of thefe reprefentations in 
which all the punilhments of hell were pourtrayed to the 
eyes of his fellow-citizens. For this purpofe, the bed of 
the river Arno had been deftined to reprefent the gulph 
of perdition ; rivers of boiling pitch, flames, ice, ferpents, 
all that the ingenious cruelty of monks could devife, was 
fet in aCtion, and applied to real fuft’erers, whofe groans 
and fcreams completed the illufion. The fubjeCts, there¬ 
fore, felefted by Dante, viz. the inviflble world, the 
three kingdoms of the dead, hell, purgatory, and paradife, 
were in this age of all others the moft popular, the moft 
profoundly religious, the moft immediately connected 
with the remembrances of his country, of glory, and of 
party-fpirit, as every dead perfon was compelled in turn 
to re-appear on this new theatre. A poem known, 
tranflated, and illuftrated, like that of Dante, makes little 
call on us for praife or cenfure. It has for ages reflected 
honour on the man and on his birth-place. Among 
other peculiarities, Dante, in conformity with many 
fathers of the church, adopts all the fables of paganifm. 
We have Acheron, and Charon, and his boat; all the 
gloomy and all the brilliant colouring of Greek mytho¬ 
logy; and all the power of poetic remembrances, united 
to the terrors of Catholicism. The Laft Judgement of 
Michael Angelo is but a reprefentation of Dante’s idea; 
and the mixture of Pagan with Chriftian characters, for 
which this picture has been cenfured, is in faCt conforma¬ 
ble to the belief and countenance of the church of Rome. 
The unbaptized fages of antiquity, are placed by Dante 
in a fort of negative elyfium ; where, ftrangers to pofitive 
pain, their tears flow inceflantly in regret for the baptifm 
of which they were ignorant. 
The want of intereft in the hero is the chief fault of 
the Divina Commedia; and the little which we feel for 
him diminifties in his purgatory, where his perfon is 
never endangered, and where the punilhments reprefented 
have no longer the force of novelty or furprife. “Few 
mafter-pieces,” fays M. de Sifmondi, “ have teftified more 
fully the power of human genius than the poem of Dante. 
Completely new in its compofttion, as in its parts, and 
without a model in any language, it was the firlt monu¬ 
ment of modern times, the firft great work that had been 
compofed in any new-born literature. It conformed to 
the efl’ential rules of the art, and to thofe which are in¬ 
variable : exhibiting unity of defign, unity in its 
progrefs, the impreflion of a powerful genius which 
perceives at one and the fame time the whole and the 
parts of which it is compofed, which difpofes of its largeft 
mafles, and which is comprehenfive enough to obferve its 
fymmetry without feeling the reftraint which it creates. 
In every other refpeCt, this poem is without the pale of 
the ancient fchool of poefy; it belongs not properly to 
any clafs; and Dante can be tried only by the laws which 
he has prelcribed for his own guidance. To place him¬ 
felf below Virgil, he modeftly called his compofition a 
Comedy, from an impreflion that Virgil’s ftyle was the 
tragic. The ignorance of the age, and of Dante, refpeft- 
ing the dramatic art, led him into this error, which is the 
wonder 
