these something terrible or touching is intimated or told, briefly at the utmost, but frequently by mere hints of narrative or gleams of allusion, which excite curiosity in the breast of the reader; who is surprised at the poet's forbearance, when, in the notes of commentators, he finds complex, strange, and fearful circumstances, on which a modern versifier or novelist would expend pages, treated here as ordinary events, on which it would be impertinent to dwell. These, in the author's own age, were generally understood; the bulk of the materials being gathered up during a period of restlessness and confusion among the republican states of Italy. Hence, though the first appearance of the "Divina Commedia," in any intelligible edition, is repulsive from the multitude of notes, and the text is not seldom difficult and dark with the oracular compression of strong ideas in few and pregnant words, yet will the toil and patience of any reader he well repaid, who perseveringly proceeds but a little way, quietly referring, as occasion may require, from the obscurity of the original to the illustrations below; for when he returns from the latter to the former (as though his own eye had been refreshed with new light, the darkness having been in it, and not in the verse), what was colourless as a cloud is radiant with beauty, and what before was undefined in form becomes exquisitely precise and symmetrical, from comprehending in so small a compass so vast a variety of thought, feeling, or fact. Dante, in this respect, must be studied as an author in a dead language by a learner, or rather as one who employs a living language on forgotten themes; then will his style grow easier and clearer as the reader grows more and more acquainted with his subject, his manner, and his materials. For whatever be the corruptions of the text (which perhaps has never been sufficiently collated), the remoteness of the allusions, and our countrymen's want of that previous knowledge of almost every thing treated upon, which best prepares the mind for the perception and highest enjoyment of poetical beauty and poetical pleasure, Dante will be found, in reality, one of the most clear, minute, and accurate writers in sentiment, as he is one of the most perfectly natural and graphic painters to the life of persons, characters, and actions. His draughts have the freedom of etchings, and the sharpness of proof impressions. His poem is well worth all the pains which the most indolent reader may take to master it.