Dante is a figure in the literature of the world, not of Italy alone. Like Shakespeare, he began with the lyric work dominant in his age. Like Shakespeare, he therein revealed a power beyond his contemporaries or predecessors. His sonnets and _Canzoni_ are indeed limited by the prevailing conventions of that style, but from him they gain a pure nobility of feeling and an intrinsic weight which no Provençal had displayed, and to which the best Italians had but striven. But to the world at large he is the author of the _Divine Comedy_. His readers, not he himself, called it the “Divine,” both because it deals with things heavenly and mystical beyond all ordinary vision, and also because it transcends all other works which bore the name of “Comedy”—divine in its subject, divine in its execution. Dante himself called it _Commedia_. He knew nothing of the correct distinctions of true drama, for none existed in his day. To him _commedia_ meant a medley, with a happy ending, something written in the vulgar tongue, not aspiring to be an epic, like that of the great master Virgil, but written in the middle style. The poem, as a fact, is no more a comedy than _Paradise Lost_ is a comedy. Yet the title is his own and is indefeasible. The _Divine Comedy_ is a work which stands alone in literature, without a distinct prototype and without a worthy follower. The fact that Homer had made Odysseus descend to the shades, and that Virgil had done the same with Aeneas, accounts for the shape or machinery, but for no more. It is a work involving the most stupendous materials—no less than an epitome of contemporary thought, belief, mysticism, aspiration, passion, history—and handled with stupendous unconsciousness of mastery.