... above the bad taste of his age and his subject, and full of passages written as purely as if they had been of the time of Ariosto and Tasso. It is curious to see this antipathetic fascination which Dante exercised over a nature so opposite to his own. At the beginning of this century Chateaubriand speaks of Dante with vague commendation, evidently from a very superficial acquaintance, and that on...