If, however, Dante is on the whole inferior to Milton in poetry pure and simple, he is more important as a representative of a great era of mankind. In him the Middle Age lives as it does in its cathedrals; and when the cathedrals have crumbled, the _Divine Comedy_ will be as fresh as it is now. Nor is this significance merely historical or antiquarian. From the very first it was appreciated by contemporaries. Repentant Florence endowed lectures upon the _Divine Comedy_, and Boccaccio was the first lecturer. In the next century Frezzi tries to transpose it into another key; and Attavanti cites from the pulpit _Dantes ille noster_ as copiously and reverentially as any of the Fathers. Even in the age of the Renaissance, Pius the Fourth’s cardinals cap quotations from Dante as the last notes of Palestrina’s Mass of Pope Marcellus die down the aisles of St Peter’s. If he afterwards fell into comparative abeyance for a time, it must be remembered that Italy lay prostrate in the seventeenth century, and that his genius did not sort well with the especial mission assigned to her in the eighteenth. There can be no surer proof of Dante’s eternal vitality than that the revival of his fame coincided with the manifestation of ideas apparently the reverse of his own. The French Revolution brought the mediæval poet into fashion; and although his best expositors, whom it is upon the whole most profitable to study, have been those so nearly at his own intellectual standpoint as Dean Church and Maria Rossetti, his most eloquent champions have been those who, on a superficial view, might seem to have least in common with him--Lamennais, Shelley, Carlyle, Symonds, Mazzini, Leopardi. The feelings of the man of the nineteenth century, attracted by the divine and eternal elements in Dante with a vehemence proportioned to his repulsion by the transient and accidental, are thus powerfully expressed by the greatest of living Italian poets: _Dante, how is it that my vows I bear, Submitted at thy shrine to bend and pray, To Night alone relinquishing thy lay, And with returning sun returning there? Never for me hath Lucy breathed a prayer, Matilde with lustral fount washed sin away, Or Beatrice on celestial way Led up her mortal love by starry stair. Thy Holy Empire I abhor, the head Of thy great Frederick in Olona’s vale Most joyfully had cloven, crown and brains. Empire and Church in crumbling ruin fail: Above, thy ringing song from heaven is sped: The Gods depart, the poet’s hymn remains._ --CARDUCCI. CHAPTER V PETRARCH AS MAN OF LETTERS