James Russell Lowell, Among my books

‘ [24] Sciences’ of Cornelius Agrippa, where he is spoken of among the authors of lascivious stories: ‘There have been many of these historical pandars, of which some of obscure fame, as Aeneas Sylvius, Dantes, and Petrarch, Boccace, Pontanus,’ etc.¹ The first German translation was that of Kannegiesser (1809). Versions by Streckfuss, Kopisch, and Prince John (late king) of Saxony followed. Goethe seems never to have given that attention to Dante which his ever-alert intelligence might have been expected to bestow on so imposing a moral and aesthetic phenomenon. Unless the conclusion of the second part of ‘Faust’ be an inspiration of the Paradiso, we remember no adequate word from him on this theme. His remarks on one of the German translations are brief, dry, and without that breadth which comes only of thorough knowledge and sympathy. But German scholarship and constructive criticism, through Witte, Kopisch, Wegele, Ruth, and others, have been of pre-eminent service in deepening the understanding and facilitating the study of the poet. In England the first recognition of Dante is by Chaucer in the ‘Hugelin of Pisa’ of the ‘Monkes Tale,’² and an imitation of the opening verses of the third canto of the Inferno (‘Assembly of Foules’). In 1417 Giovanni da Serravalle, bishop of Fermo, completed a Latin prose translation of the Commedia, a copy of which, as he made it at the request of two English bishops whom he met at the council of Constance, was doubtless sent to England. Later we find Dante now and then mentioned, but evidently