For Homer and Shakespeare reflect the ages in which they lived, in all their fullness and variety of life and motive, largely sinking their own individuality in the intensity and breadth of their sympathies. They are great teachers doubtless, and fail not to lash what they regard as the growing vices or follies of the day, and to impress upon their hearers the solemn lessons of those inevitable facts of life which they epitomise and vivify. But their teaching is chiefly incidental or indirect, it is largely unconscious, and is often almost as difficult to unravel from their works as it is from the life and nature they so faithfully reflect. With Dante it is far otherwise. Aglow with a prophet's passionate conviction, an apostle's undying zeal, he is guided by a philosopher's breadth and clearness of principle, a poet's unfailing sense of beauty and command of emotions, to a social reformer's definite and practical aims and a mystic's peace of religious communion. And though his works abound in dramatic touches of startling power and variety, and delineations of character unsurpassed in delicacy, yet with all the depth and scope of his sympathies he never for a moment loses himself or forgets his purpose. As a philosopher and statesman, he had analysed with keen precision the social institutions, the political forces, and the historical antecedents by which he found his time and country dominated; as a moralist, a theologian, and a man, he had grasped with a firmness that nothing could relax the essential conditions of human blessedness here and hereafter, and with an intensity and fixity of definite self-conscious purpose almost without parallel he threw the passionate energy of his nature into the task of preaching the eternal truth to his countrymen, and through them to the world, and thwarting and crushing the powers and institutions which he regarded as hostile to the well-being of mankind. He strove to teach his brothers that their true bliss lay in the exercise of virtue here, and the blessed vision of God hereafter. And as a step towards this, and an essential part of its realisation, he strove to make Italy one in heart and tongue, to raise her out of the sea of petty jealousies and intrigues in which she was plunged; in a word, to erect her into a free, united country, with a noble mother tongue. These two purposes were one; and, supported and supplemented by a never-dying zeal for truth, a never-failing sense of beauty, they inspired the life and works of Dante Alighieri.