Karl Witte, on the contrary—though he began life as an Infant Prodigy, matriculating at Leipsic when only nine and a half years old, and reading his Doctor’s thesis before he was fourteen—won recognition in Italy and England as well as in Germany as a real force in Dante scholarship: a great pioneer, who made his mistakes, as all pioneers will, but has won the gratitude of all subsequent Dantists. In the Essay of which I have spoken, written and delivered as a lecture in 1861, Witte notes the fact and investigates the grounds of the constant association of Dante’s name with the patriotic aspirations of Young Italy. “It is a fact,” he says, “that, during the last half century, a great number of those who aimed at transforming Italy—and not only men of such moderation as Cesare Balbo, Gino Capponi, or Carlo Troya, but also the democratic revolutionaries who would take the world by storm—have hung, and still hang, upon Dante’s _Divine Comedy_, with passionate enthusiasm. Ugo Foscolo, who preferred poverty and exile to place and honour under the rule of Austria, devoted the last years of his life exclusively to a great work on the poem; and after Foscolo’s death, this new edition of the ‘Prophecy of Italy’s Future,’ as he called the Comedy, was published by no other than Giuseppe Mazzini himself....” If the Italian of the Sixties “were asked whence his countrymen drew their inspiration, he would scarcely hesitate,” says Witte, “to name the greatest poet of his fatherland.” And again, “the fact that in the days of foreign oppression patriots recognised each other by their love of the immortal poet, and greeted one another, as by a secret password, with the inspiring lines of the Divine Poem, is a symbol of the fact that the roots of this temper of mind”—the temper of national “self-reliance and self-renouncing enthusiasm”—“are to be sought in Dante.” There are three passions, according to Witte, which are (rightly or wrongly) traced back to Dante: (1) a glowing love for Italy, (2) a hatred of the foreign, and above all of the Teuton yoke, and (3) a hatred of the temporal power of the Pope. In the first case—and this is the point that more immediately concerns us—Witte holds that the contention is justified. “In hope, in sorrow, in reproof, we see Dante filled,” he says, “with the same glowing love for the Fatherland of Italy, a love which he is the first to put into words.” Before Dante, at any rate, Italy was, in Metternich’s famous phrase, “nothing but a geographical expression.” The Roman poets of the Empire praise her scenery, but their devotion as patriots is to Rome itself. When the Empire broke up, Italy lost her one bond of superficial cohesion, though a shadowy unity emerged now and again under Visigothic and Longobardic domination, and the pressure now of Gothic Arianism, now of Byzantine Iconoclasm, drew Italy’s various groups in self defence closer to Papal Rome.