Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/41

 DANTE 19 ing less than what is universal to mankind. Of the common range of thought and feeling he is perfect and absolute master ; and in the graver passages of the epistles, as in the sad and noble cadence of his most famous odes, the melan- choly temper which underlay his quick and bright humor touches the deepest springs of human nature. Of his style the most perfect criticism was given in the next generation by a single phrase, Horatii curiosa felicitas ; of no poet can it be more truly said, in the phrase of the Greek dramatist Agathon, that "skill has an affection for luck and luck for skill." His poetry supplies more phrases which have become proverbial than the rest of Latin literature put to- gether. To suggest a parallel in English literature we must unite in thought the excellences of Pope and Gray with the easy wit and cultured grace of Addison. Horace's historical position in Latin literature is this : on the one hand, he carried on and perfected the native Roman growth, satire, from the ruder essays of Lucilius, so as to make Roman life from day to day, in city and country, live anew under his pen ; on the other hand, he naturalized the metres and manner of the great Greek lyric poets, from Alcaeus and Sappho downward. Before Hor- ace Latin lyric poetry is represented almost wholly by the brilliant but technically immature poems of Catullus ; after him it ceases to exist. For what he made it he claims, in a studied modesty of phrase but with a just sense of his own merits, an immortality to rival that of Rome. DANTE By Archdeacon Farrar, D.D., F.R.S. I (1265-1321) n this paper I will give a rapid sketch of Dante's life, and then will try to point to some of the feat- ures of a poem which must ever take its place among the supremest efforts of the human intellect, side by side with Homer's " Iliad," and Virgil's "iEneid," and Milton's " Paradise Lost," and the plays of Shake- speare ; and which is not less great than any of these in its immortal and epoch-making significance. Dante was born in 1 265, in the small room of a small house in Florence, still pointed out as the Casa di Dante. His father, Aldighieri, was a lawyer, and belonged to the humbler class of burgher-nobles. The family seems to have changed its name into Alighieri, " the wing-bearers,""at a later time, in accordance with the beautiful coat of arms which they adopted a wing in an azure field. Dante was a devout, beautiful, precocious boy, and his susceptible soul caught a touch