The interest of the events which moulded Dante’s career and influenced his work has perhaps led to their occupying too large a share of these pages; but it has been thought best to go into the history at some length, as being after all the first and most essential step towards a thorough comprehension of the position which his writings, and especially the _Commedia_, hold in European literature. This is quite unique of its kind. Never before or since has a poem of the highest imagination served--not merely as a political manifesto, but--as a party pamphlet; and we may safely say that no such poem will in future serve that purpose, at all events until the conditions under which it was produced occur. Whether that is ever likely to be the case, those who have followed the history may judge. FOOTNOTES: [27] So I understand an obviously corrupt passage in Villani, viii. 41. One of the unlucky Blacks was a Portinari, doubtless a kinsman of Beatrice--a fact which curiously seems to have escaped the conjectural commentators. CHAPTER VI. THE “COMMEDIA” So many good summaries of the _Commedia_ exist that to give another may appear superfluous. At the same time, experience shows not only that such a summary is found by most readers to be the best of all helps to the study of the poem, but also that every fresh summariser treats it from a somewhat different point of view. It is therefore possible that in the following pages answers, or at least suggestions of answers, may be found to some questions which previous writers, in England at all events, have passed over; and that they may serve in some measure as a supplement to the works which will be mentioned in the appendix. § 1. HELL.