Dr. Toynbee[1] finds that since 1802 the _Commedia_ as a whole has been translated into English about once every four years. And he excludes from his record American translators and critics. Why did Dr. Toynbee or the British Academy make this commemorative volume so narrowly insular? English and American scholarship is one institution. And American Dantists have done good work. Though it is the fashion to scorn the Yankee bards and seers, Lowell's essay and the translations by Longfellow, Norton, and Parsons are important in the history of Dante in English, not British, literature. They had literary gifts, they knew Italian, and they were able to appreciate a universal mind. For all their provinciality their shades can afford to smile at their young countryman, Mr. Mencken, who writes: "If I have to go to hell for it, I must here set down my conviction that much of the 'Divine Comedy' is piffle." Well, he ought to go to hell--to Dante's hell, which is an entertaining and hospitable place. In the cold prose of Norton or John Carlyle, where the melody is necessarily lost, there may be some passages in which an alert modern reader cannot find great interest, but the number of lines of "piffle" is exactly none. [1] Britain's Tribute To Dante in Literature and Art. A Chronological Record of 540 Years. By Paget Toynbee. London: Published for the British Academy, 1921. It is not to be expected that all men, even all literary men, will respond to Dante. Horace Walpole called him "extravagant, absurd, disgusting; in short, a Methodist parson in Bedlam." This is amusing, even refreshing, in view of the too pious devotion of some later Englishmen. But the eighteenth century was not the time for English appreciation of Dante, and Walpole, witty _prosateur_, was not the man to enjoy him. Dante was known, of course, to Chaucer and to the Elizabethans and Milton, and his influence on English poetry was perhaps even greater than Dr. Toynbee's record makes evident. But it is with the nineteenth century, which, _bien entendu_, was born intellectually a few years before its numerical date, that Dante becomes a power in English literature. He is, indeed, a part of the revival of English romanticism. The translations of Boyd and Cary appeared early in the century, and from then on Dante belonged to English literature, as well acclimated as any other foreign classic. The index of Dr. Toynbee's record contains the names of almost all the important English poets from Scott to Francis Thompson.