images of divine beings, the eternal Father, Christ, or the Virgin, painted or sculptured, were of colossal dimensions. But the human mind is like land which, after lying waste for long centuries, when first cultivated bears crops of wonderful quality, size and abundance. Thus at the close of barbarism in Italy after four savage and stormy centuries, arose Dante, the Homer of the second barbarism, just as somewhat later flourished the delicate verse of Petrarch and the gallant and graceful prose of Boccaccio; all three incomparable in their way. And since barbarism is, as we have already indicated, truthful, frank, faithful, generous and magnanimous by nature, Dante puts on the stage real persons and real actions of the dead; and his poem is called a "comedy" in allusion to the ancient comedy which followed the same principle. It is a poem in which both the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ find parallels; the former in the _Inferno,_ where Dante employs his choleric genius and all his vast imagination in describing the effects of implacable wrath and recalling numbers of merciless punishments, a worthy companion-picture to the horrid slaughters of Homer (whose descriptions of them inspire pity in us, but gave nothing but pleasure to his own audience); the latter, the _Odyssey,_ which celebrates the heroic endurance of Ulysses, is paralleled by the _Purgatorio,_ a spectacle of severe punishments borne with immovable patience, and the _Paradiso_ where infinite joy is experienced with an infinite tranquillity of mind. Another similarity between Dante and Homer lies in the physiognomy of the former's language, which is so varied that some suppose him to have collected it like Homer from all the dialects of his nation; an opinion of sixteenth-century scholars which will not stand criticism, for it is certain that when Dante used them these expressions must have been current at Florence, and that a lifetime would have been insufficient to collect them from this side and from that when there were no writers in the various dialects. But the most important resemblance of Dante to Homer is in poetic sublimity. Dante is a divine poet who to the delicate imaginations of to-day seems rough and uncivilised, and often shocks by unwonted harmonies an ear that has become morbidly sensitive through effeminate music. But he is received very differently by men of severe tastes who refuse to be satisfied with flowers, ornaments and graces. Like Homer too he is great not in esoteric wisdom but in the vigour of his imagination. Dante was undoubtedly a very learned theologian, but that was his weakness rather than his strength. If he had known neither Scholasticism nor Latin, he would have been a still greater poet, and perhaps the Tuscan language would have had what Latin never had, a poet who could in everything bear comparison with Homer.