DANTE, Alighieri, one of the first poets of Italy, was born at Florence in May 1265, being descended of an ancient and honourable family. The name he received at his birth was Durante, which was abbreviated into Dante, in which form it has descended to posterity. Boccacio, who lived at the same period, has left a very curious and entertaining treatise on the life, studies, and manners of this extraordinary poet, whom he regarded as his master, and for whose memory he cherished the highest veneration. This biographer relates, that Dante, before he was nine years old, conceived a passion for the lady whom lie has immortalized in his singular poem. Her age was nearly the same as his own, and her name was Beatrice, the daughter of Folco Portinari, a noble citizen of Florence. The passion of Dante, however, like that of his successor Petrarch, seems to have been of the chaste and Platonic kind, according to the account he has given of it in one of his early productions in prose, entitled Vita Nuova, in which he mentions both the origin of his affection and the death of his mistress, who, according to Boccacio, died at the age of twenty-four. The same author asserts that Dante, in consequence of this event, fell into a deep melancholy, from which his friends endeavoured to rouse him, by persuading him to marry. After some time he followed their advice, and repented it; for he unfortunately made choice of a lady named Gemma, of the house of Donati, who bore a considerable resemblance to Xan-tippe; and the poet, not possessing the patience of Socrates, separated himself from her with such vehement expressions of dislike, that he never afterwards admitted her to his presence, though she had borne him several children. In the early part of his life he acquired some credit in a military character, having distinguished himself by his bravery in an action where the Florentines obtained a signal victory over the citizens of Arezzo. But he became still more eminent by the acquisition of civil honours; and at the age of twenty-five he rose to be one of the chief magistrates of Florence, when that dignity was conferred by the suffrages of the people. From this exaltation, however, the poet himself dated his principal misfortunes, as appears by the fragment of a letter quoted by Leonardo Bruni, one of his early biographers, in which Dante speaks of his political failure with that liberal frankness which integrity inspires. Italy was at that time distracted by the contending factions of the Gibelines and the Guelfs; and the latter, with whom Dante took an active part, were again divided into the Blacks and the Whites. Dante, as Gravina informs us, exerted all his influence to unite these inferior parties; but his efforts proved ineffectual, and he had the misfortune to be unjustly persecuted by those of his own faction. A powerful citizen of Florence, named Corso Donati, had taken measures to terminate these intestine broils, by introducing Charles of Valois, brother of Philip the Fair, king of France. But Dante, with great vehemence, opposed this disgraceful project, and obtained the banishment of Donati and his partizans. The exiles, however, applied to the pope, Boniface VIII. and by his assistance succeeded in their design. Charles of Valois entered Florence in [7:7:618]triumph, and those who had opposed his admission were banished in their turn. Dante had been dispatched to Rome as the ambassador of his party, and was upon his return when he received intelligence of the revolution in his native city. His enemies, availing themselves of his absence, had procured an iniquitous sentence against him, by which he was condemned to banishment, and his possessions were confiscated. His two enthusiastic biographers, Boccacio and Manetti, express the warmest indignation against the injustice of his country. Dante, on receiving this intelligence, took refuge in Sienna, and afterwards in Arezzo, where many of his party had assembled. An attempt was then made to surprise the city of Florence by a small army which Dante is supposed to have attended; but the design miscarried, and the poet is conjectured to have wandered throughout various parts of Italy, until he found a patron in Candella Scala, prince of Verona, whom he has celebrated in his poem. The high spirit of Dante was ill suited to courtly dependence, and he is said to have lost the favour of his Veronese patron by the rough frankness of his manner and bearing. From Verona, according to Manetti, he retired to France; and Boccacio affirms that he disputed in the theological schools of Paris with great reputation. Bayle questions his visiting Paris at this period of his life, and thinks it improbable, that a man who had been one of the chief magistrates of Florence should have condescended to engage in the public disputations of the Parisian theologists. But the spirit both of Dante and the times in which he lived sufficiently accounts for this exercise of his talents; and his residence in France at the period in question is confirmed by Boccacio, in his life of the poet, which Bayle seems to have had no opportunity of consulting.

The election of Henry count of Luxemburg to the empire in November 1308, afforded Dante a prospect of being restored to his native city, as he had attached himself to the interest of the new emperor, in whose service he is supposed to have written his Latin treatise De AIonarcliia i in which he asserted the rights of the empire against the encroachments of the papacy. In the year 1311 he instigated Henry to lay siege to Florence, an enterprise in which he did not appear in person, from motives of respect towards his native city. But the emperor was repulsed by the Florentines; and his death, which happened in the following year, deprived Dante of all hopes of ever being re-established in Florence. After this disappointment, he is supposed to have passed some years in roving about Italy in a state of poverty and distress, until he found an honourable establishment at Ravenna, under the protection of Guido Novello da Polenta, lord of that city, who received the illustrious exile with the most endearing liberality, continued to protect him during the few remaining years of his life, and extended his munificence even to the ashes of the poet.

Eloquence was one of the many talents which Dante possessed in an eminent degree. On this account he is said to have been employed, in the course of his life, on fourteen different embassies, and to have succeeded in most of them. His patron Guido having occasion to try his abilities in a service of this nature, dispatched him as his ambassador to negociate a peace with the Venetians, who were preparing for hostilities against Ravenna. But Manetti asserts that he was unable to procure a public audience at Venice, and returned to Ravenna by land, from apprehension of the Venetian fleet; when the fatigue of his journey, and the mortification of having failed in his attempt to preserve his generous patron from the impending danger, threw him into a fever, which terminated in death on the 14th of September 1321. He died, however, in the palace of his friend; and the generous Guido paid the most tender regard to his memory. This munificent patron commanded the body to be adorned with poetical ornaments, and, after being carried on a bier through the streets of Ravenna by the most illustrious citizens, to be deposited in a marble sarcophagus. He himself pronounced the funeral oration, and expressed his design of erecting a splendid monument in honour of the deceased; a design which his subsequent misfortunes rendered him unable to accomplish. At his request many epitaphs were written on the poet, the best of which were by Giovanni del Virgilio of Bologna, a celebrated author of that time, and the intimate friend of Dante. Boccacio then cites a few Latin verses, not worth transcribing, six of which are quoted by Bayle, on the authority of Paul Jovius, as the composition of Dante himself. In 1483 Bernardo Bembo, the father of the celebrated cardinal, raised a handsome monument over the neglected ashes of the bard.

Before this period the Florentines had vainly endeavoured to obtain from the city of Ravenna the bones of their great poet. In the age of Leo X. they made a second attempt, by a solemn application to the pope for that purpose; and Michel Angelo, an enthusiastic admirer of Dante, very liberally offered to execute a magnificentmo-nument to the poet. But the hopes of the Florentines were again disappointed. The particulars of their singular petition may be found in the notes of Codivi’s Life of Michel Angelo.

At what time, and in what place, he executed the great and singular work which has rendered him immortal, hisnu∙ merous commentators have been unable to determine. Boccacio asserts that he began it in his thirty-fifth year, and had finished seven cantos of his Inferno before his exile; and that in the plunder of his house on that occasion the beginning of his poem was fortunately preserved, but remained for some time neglected, till its merit being accidentally discovered by an intelligent poet named Dino, it was sent to the Marquis Marcello Malespina, an Italian nobleman, by whom Dante was then protected. The marquis restored these papers to the poet, and entreated him to proceed with a work which opened in so promising a manner. To this incident we are probably indebted for the poem of Dante, which he must have continued under all the disadvantages of an unfortunate and agitated life. It does not appear at what time he completed it; perhaps before he quitted Verona, as he dedicated the Paradise to his Veronese patron. The critics have variously accounted for his having called his poem Commedia. He gave it the title, said one of his sons, because it opens with distress and closes with felicity. The very high estimation in which this production was held by his country appears from a singular institution. The republic of Florence, in the year 1373, assigned a public salary to a person appointed to read lectures on the poem of Dante, and Boccacio was the first person engaged in this office; but his death happening about two years after his appointment, his comments extended only to the seventeen first cantos of the Inferno. The critical dissertations which have been written on Dante are almost as numerous as those to which Homer himself has given birth; the Italian, like the Grecian bard, having been the subject of the highest panegyric and of the grossest invective.

The most ancient Italian commentary extant on the Divina Commedia is that of Boccacio, which, however, was not printed until 1724, at Naples. Specimens of other commentaries will be found in the first volume of Muratori’s Antiquitates Italicae. The first edition of the text without commentaries is that of 1472, in folio, without the name of any place, but printed at Foligno under the title of La Commedia di Dante Alighieri, delle pene e punizioni de Vizj, e premj delle Virtu. The same year [7:7:619]another appeared at Mantua, in folio, bearing the Latin title of Dantis Capitula, Italice ; but the most valuable of all these editions is that of Naples, 1477, in folio, which is now very scarce and high priced. The first of the old editions with commentaries is that of Milan, 1478, in folio, entitled Dantis Comoedia cum Commentariis, by Martin Paul Nidobeato de Navarre, printed, the text in beautiful characters, and the commentaries in Gothic. This edition is highly esteemed on account of the purity of the text, and the excellent lessons which it affords. The principal editions accompanied with commentaries are those of Florence, 1481, folio; Venice, 1491, folio; Venice, 1554, in 4to; Lyons, 1547, in 16to; Venice, 1568, in 4to; Padua, 1727, in 3 vols. 8vo; Venice, 1739, in 3 vols. 8vo; Verona, 1749; and Venice, 1757, 1758, 3 vols. large 4to. The most esteemed editions of the text alone since the fifteenth century, are those of Venice, Aldus, 1502. in 8vo; Aldus and Andrea d’ Assola, 1515, in 8vo; Florence, Juntes, 1506, in 8vo; Florence, 1595, in 8vo, being the Della-Cruscan edition, which was reprinted at Naples in 1716, in 12mo; Paris, Prault, 1768, in 2 vols. 12mo; Parma, Bodoni, 1796, in 3 vols. 4to; Pisa, 1804, in 3 vols. folio; Milan, Mussi, 1809, in 3 vols. large atlas folio. The best French translation of Dante’s works is that of Artaud, published at Paris in 1811, 1812, 1813. In English there are two translations, both excellent, the one by Carey and the other by Wright. The Inferno has given rise to a good deal of speculation, of which some account will be found in die Edinburgh Review, vol. lv. The lyric productions or Time of Dante, though inferior to his great poem, are not unworthy of him. They are to be found in the Venetian editions of his works, published by Pasquali in 1741 and by Zatta in 1758. These two editions also contain the prose works of Dante, the most interesting of which is his Vita Nuova. The Convivio di Dante is a commentary in prose on three of his Canzoni. The treatise De Monarchia, written in Latin, had for its object to support the rights of the Emperor Henry VII. by whose means Dante hoped to be restored to his country in spite of the pope, who had been the cause of his disgrace and exile; and though the style is devoid of elegance, it nevertheless displays considerable vigour. In the treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia, also written in Latin, Dante proposed to examine the state of the Italian language about a century after its origin, to indicate the idioms formed nearly at the same time in different parts of Italy, which ought to prevail, and to point out the different species of composition in which the language had been employed with success, as well as the authors who had most distinguished themselves by their writings in that language. The edition of Zatta above mentioned also contains paraphrases of the seven penitential psalms, of the Credo, the Pater Noster, and the Ave Maria, pieces which have nothing in common with his great poem, except the form of the verses and the interlacement of the rhymes.