And here I must once for all utter a warning, and thereby discharge myself of a special duty. The Old Testament itself has not been more ruthlessly allegorised than have Dante's works and even his very life. The lack of trustworthy materials, in any great abundance, for an account of the poet's outward lot, the difficulty of fixing with certainty when he is himself relating actual events and when his apparent narratives are merely allegorical, the obscurity, incompleteness, and even apparent inconsistency of some of the data he supplies, the uncertainty as to the exact time at which his different works were composed and the precise relation in which they stand to each other, and the doubts which have been thrown upon the authenticity of some of the minor documents upon which the poet's biographers generally rely, have all combined to involve almost every step of his life in deep obscurity. Here, then, is a field upon which laborious research, ingenious conjecture, and wild speculation can find unending employment, and consequently every branch of the study has quite a literature of its own. Now into this mass of controversial and speculative writings on Dante, I do not make the smallest pretensions to have penetrated a single step. I am far from wishing to disparage such studies, or to put forward in my own defence that stale and foolish plea, the refuge of pretentious ignorance in every region of inquiry, that a mind coming fresh to the study has the advantage over those that are already well versed in it; but surely the students who are making the elucidation of Dante their life work would not ask or wish, that until their endless task is completed all those whose souls have been touched by the direct utterance of the great poet should hold their peace until qualified to speak by half a life of study. With no further apology, then, for seeming to venture too rashly on the task, we may go on to a brief sketch of Dante's life and principles. The main lines which I shall follow are in most cases traced distinctly enough by Dante's own hand, and to the best of my belief they represent a fair average of the present or recent conclusions of scholars; but, on the other hand, there have always been some who would unhesitatingly treat as allegory much of what I shall present to you as fact, who for instance would treat all Dante's love for Beatrice, and indeed Beatrice's very existence, as purely allegorical; and, again, where the allegory is admitted on all hands, there is a ceaseless shifting and endless variety in the special interpretations adopted and rejected by the experts. * * * * *