...e for whom Italian literature means Dante only. Yet Voltaire wrote of Dante, only a century and a half ago, that although occasionally, under favorable circumstances, he wrote lines not unworthy of Tasso or Ariosto, yet his work was, as a whole, stupidly extravagant and barbarous. The Italians, he says, call him divine, but it is a hidden divinity; few people understand his oracles. He has commen...