[Footnote 1: _Dante's Divine Comedy, the Inferno; a literal Prose Translation, with the Text of the Original._ By J.A. CARLYLE, M.D., London: 1849. I have never quite forgiven myself for not having said more of the unpretending but honest and most useful volume which stood at the head of this essay when it first appeared as an article. It was placed there, according to what was then a custom of article writers, as a peg to hang remarks upon which might or might not be criticisms of the particular book so noticed. It did not offer itself specially to my use, and my attention was busy with my own work. But this was no excuse for availing myself of a good book, and not giving it the notice which it deserved. To an English student beginning Dante, and wishing to study him in a scholarly manner, it is really more useful than a verse translation can be; and I have always greatly regretted that the plan of translating the whole work was dropped for want of the appreciation which the first instalment ought to have had. (1878.)] The _Divina Commedia_ is one of the landmarks of history. More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art, and the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the mind's power, which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up ineffaceably and for ever as time goes on, marking out its advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the consent of all who come after. It stands with the _Iliad_ and Shakspere's Plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the _Novum Organon_ and the _Principia_, with Justinian's _Code_, with the Parthenon and S. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens European literature, as the _Iliad_ did that of Greece and Rome. And, like the _Iliad_, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in undiminished freshness the literature which it began.