Page:Dante and His Circle, with the Italian Poets Preceding Him.djvu/11

Rh other writers his contemporaries or successors, were religious and political reformers, leagued together in a secret society having some substantial analogy to freemasonry; and that their writings have an esoteric significance and value highly different and divergent from their exoteric meaning. Whether he was right or wrong in this view I shall in no wise debate; but will affirm that he was at any rate ingenious, subtle, and laboriously diligent. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was born in London in May 1828, and who from his earliest years spoke Italian with our father just as he spoke English with other people, was thus breathing a Dantesque intellectual atmosphere as soon as his perceptions began to expand to any matters of the mind. Nevertheless he did not, in the years of childhood or of early boyhood, take any particular interest in Dante—this may have begun towards the year 1843, soon after he had left school, and commenced study as a painter: neither did he at any time show the least tendency towards adopting, or even towards scrutinising, the allegorical, non-natural, or abstruse interpretations which our father put upon Dante and the Italian Mediæval and Renaissance writers. To the younger Rossetti the interest of Dante was the interest of his poetry and his sentiment: he was quite inclined to take it on trust that Dante truly meant what he plainly—or sometimes what he not very plainly, yet still apparently and ostensibly—said. Having once rallied with ardent zest to the great Florentine, he pursued the study of that line of poetic literature, as represented by Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoja, and other writers who figure in the present volume; and from reading he soon went on to