Besides the prose letters, two poetical epistles are still extant, and these, strange to say, the most sceptical critics have so far allowed to pass unquestioned. There is something a little pathetic about their history. Two or three years before Dante’s death, a young scholar of Bologna, known from his devotion to the great Latin bard, as Joannes de Virgilio, addressed an extremely prosaic, but highly complimentary, epistle to the old poet, urging him to write something in the more dignified language of antiquity. Dante replied in an “Eclogue,” wherein, under Virgilian pastoral imagery, he playfully banters his correspondent, and says that he had better finish first the work he has in hand, namely the _Commedia_. One more communication on either side followed, and then Dante’s death brought the verse-making to a close. In his own pieces one is struck rather by the melody of the rhythm and occasional dignity of the thought, than by the classical quality of the Latinity. But they are unquestionably remarkable specimens of Latin verse for an age previous to the revival of classical study, and, we should say, far more genial and more truly Virgilian in spirit than the most polished composition of the Humanists. It is not intended here to enter into any analysis or estimate of Dante’s prose works. The former task is one which readers should perform for themselves. Nor need they find it too much for their powers. With all his obscurity of allusion, and occasionally of phrase, Dante is not really a difficult author. From his teachers, the schoolmen, he had learnt to arrange his matter with due, perhaps more than due, regard to order and symmetry; and consequently the attentive reader is seldom at a loss to know what part of the subject is, at any given place, under consideration. Of the obscurity which results from over-elaboration of the thought, or from an attempt at originality of expression, Dante is, in his maturer works, singularly free.[42] It must be remembered, too, that very often phrases which look to us like “conceits” are merely instances of the employment of scientific and technical terms now obsolete, but then familiar to every cultivated reader. For æsthetic, or, as it has been unkindly called, “sign-post” criticism--that which, under the guise of directing the reader’s taste, often seems intended to call attention mainly to the acuteness of the critic’s own perception or his delicacy of phrase--the study of Dante would seem to be a very unpromising field. The sentimentalist and the elegant craftsman in words seem out of place in the company of this uncompromising seeker after realities, this relentless exposer of shams.