Dante, or properly Durante, Alighieri was born in Florence of an ancient and noble family, in the year 1265. We may note that his life falls in a period which we used to be taught to regard as an age of intellectual stagnation and social barbarism, in which Christianity had degenerated into a jumbled chaos of puerile and immoral superstitions! We may note also that in the early years of his life the poet was a contemporary of some of the noblest representatives of the feudo-Catholic civilisation, that is to say of mediæval philosophy, theology, and chivalry, while his manhood was joined in loving friendship with the first supremely great mediæval artist, and before he died one of the great precursors and heralds of the revival of learning was growing up to manhood and another had already left his cradle. To speak of Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, and St. Louis, as living when Dante was born, of Giotto as his companion and friend, of Petrarch and Boccaccio as already living when he died, is to indicate more clearly than could be done by any more elaborate statement, the position he occupies at the very turning point of the Middle Ages when the forces of modern life had begun to rise, but the supremacy of mediæval faith and discipline was as yet unbroken. Accordingly Dante, in whom the truest spirit of his age is, as it were, 'made flesh,' may be variously regarded as the great morning star of modern enlightenment, freedom, and culture, or as the very type of mediæval discipline, faith, and chivalry. To me, I confess, this latter aspect of Dante's life is altogether predominant. To me he is the very incarnation of Catholicism, not in its shame, but in its glory. Yet the future is always contained in the present when rightly understood, and just because Dante was the perfect representative of his own age, he became the herald and the prophecy of the ages to come, not, as we often vainly imagine them, rebelling against and escaping from the overshadowing solemnity of the ages past, but growing out of them as their natural and necessary result.