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name of Dante Alighieri, the first and greatest of Italian poets, has been universally allowed a place in the very highest rank of literature—that airy summit reaching to the skies, where as yet only two others have been acknowledged as his equals, sovereign poets, beyond all competition or decay. Like Homer, he may be said to have created, in using it, the noble language in which his great poem is the chief monument; like Shakespeare, he has searched to the deepest roots of life, and combined philosophy with imagination: but his position is independent and individual, as distinct from those of his great companions as they are from each other. He is the Poet of the Middle Ages, as Homer was of the primeval heroic world; and he has the best right to head and lead the representatives of European letters as being himself the first fount and well-spring of modern literature and poetry. Before the time of Shakespeare the "well of English undefiled" had already been opened; but Dante formed
 * F.C.—I.