his persecutors! No, my Father, this is not the way that shall lead me back to my country. But I shall return with hasty steps, if you or any other can open to me a way that shall not derogate from the fame and honour of Dante; but if by no such way Florence can be entered, then Florence I shall never enter. What! shall I not every where enjoy the sight of the sun and stars? and may I not seek and contemplate, in every corner of the earth under the canopy of heaven, consoling and delightful truth, without first rendering myself inglorious, nay infamous, to the people and republic of Florence? Bread, I hope, will not fail me."] 7.-Page 100, line 27. "What have I done to thee, my people?" Stern "E scrisse più volte non solamente a particolari cittadini del reggimento, ma ancora al popolo, e intra l' altre una Epistola assai lunga che comincia: Popule mi, quid feci tibi?"-Vita di Dante scritta da Lionardc Aretino. [His countrymen showed, too late, that they knew the value of what they had lost. At the beginning of the next century, they entreated that the ashes of their illustrious citizen might be restored to them; but the people of Ravenna were unwilling to part with the honourable memorial of their own hospitality. No better success attended the subsequent negotiations of the Florentines, though renewed under the auspices of Leo X., and conducted through the powerful mediation of Michael Angelo.] INTRODUCTION TO FRANCESCA OF RIMINI. FRANCESCA, daughter of Guido da Polenta, Lord of Ravenna, was given by her father in marriage to Lanciotto, son of Malatesta, Lord of Rimini. Lanciotto, who was brave but deformed, feared to be rejected if he was seen before the ceremony by his destined bride, and he therefore sent his younger brother Paolo, a handsome and accomplished man, as his proxy to marry Francesca. On seeing Paolo she mistook him for her intended husband, and an attachment ensued, which ended in their being detected in adultery, and stabbed by Lanciotto. State-policy was the motive with Francesca's father to insist upon the match, and his friends had warned him from the outset that his high-spirited daughter would never submit to be sacrificed with impunity. None of these extenuating circumstances are related by Dante, but he has conducted his narrative with infinite refinement and fidelity to nature. Francesca loves because she is beloved, yet there is no guilty intention with either. Their strong and mutual attachment is unavowed, until a story, in which the feelings of each are put into words, becomes an interpreter between them, tears the veil from their passion, and hurries them on to the deplorable catastrophe. The episode is considered the most pathetic in the Divina Commedia, and it greatly increases the pathos that the father of Francesca was the friend and protector of the poet. It is asserted, indeed, that this portion of the poem was composed in the house in which Francesca was born. A stern justice mingled with the sensibility of Dante, and with such motives to sorrow over the fate of the lovers, and while actually representing himself as swooning with pity, he has condemned them to a place in his Inferno for their crime. Lord Byron must have felt deeply the poetic version of the tragic tale, for he held that when Dante was tender he displayed a gentleness beyond all example. The translation was executed at Ravenna in March, 1820. In transmitting it to Mr. Murray, Lord Byron says: 'Enclosed you will find line for line, in third rhyme (terza rima), of which your British blackguard reader as yet understands nothing, Fanny of Rimini. I have done it into cramp English, line for line, and rhyme for rhyme, to try the possibility. If it is published, publish it with the original." On another occasion he called it "the cream of all translations," but cramp English" is the juster description. The spirit is too much sacrificed to the letter. It has not the force, the freedom, nor the melody of the original, and shows how close an approach may be made to verbal accuracy without retaining the soul of song. |