Page:The Earliest Lives of Dante (Smith 1901).djvu/68

Rh himself eternal glory. And since, as has been shown, he preferred poetry to every other study, he planned to create a poetic composition. Having long premeditated what was to be done, in his thirty-fifth year he began to put into effect what he had before deliberated upon, namely, to censure and reward the lives of men according to the diversity of their merits. And inasmuch as he saw that life was of three sorts—the vicious life, the life of departing from vice and advancing toward virtue, and the virtuous life—he admirably divided his work, which he entitled Commedia, into three books, in the first of which he censured the wicked and in the last rewarded the good. The three books he again divided into cantos, and the cantos into rhythms (ritmi), as may be plainly seen. He composed it in rime in the vernacular with such art, and in so wonderful and beautiful an order, that there has yet been none who could justly find any fault therewith.

How subtle a poet he was throughout this work can be seen by those to whom is given a faculty great enough to understand the poem. But as we see that great things cannot be comprehended in a short space of time, we must conclude that an undertaking so great, so lofty, and so elaborate, as was the poetic inclusion under rimed vernacular verse of all the actions of men and their deserts, could not be brought to its end in a little while. Especially would this be true of a man agitated by many and varied chances of fortune, all of them full of anguish and poisoned with bitterness, as was shown above to have been the lot of Dante. Therefore from the hour when, as stated above, he gave himself to this high work, even to the end of his life did his labor continue; yet he composed other works in the meantime, as will appear. Nor will it be beside the mark to touch in part on certain accidents that befell the beginning and the end of this work.