CHAPTER IV. FLORENCE. General Remarks on Florence.- Its Literary Glories. The Tuscan Triumvirate of the Fourteenth Century. - Sketch of the Life of Dante.- Considerations on his great Poem. Its Plan.-Object of the Poem.- Stories of Francesca da Rimini, and Ugolino of Pisa.- Characteristical Feature of Dante's Mind.-Particular Passages of Striking Beauty. Moral Tendency of the Poem. General Estimate of the Merits of the Divina Commedia.- Dante's Commentators. -Petrarca. His Life. The Nature of his Attachment His Learned Acquisitions. -Boccaccio.- His Life and Writings. CHAPTER IV. FLORENCE. FLORENCE detained me many months, but a stranger must pass a much longer time in the city of the Medici and in the garden of Tuscany, before his mind would sink into a state of indolence and satiety. No scenery can be richer than the storied vale of Arno, flourishing in the beauty of perpetual spring. The convents and villas, half hidden in the recesses, or standing prominent on the eminences of the neighbourhood of Florence, are studies for the painter. I have often traced, with my Boccaccio in my hand, the various landscapes that extend before the windows of the Franciscan convent which Cosmo de' Medici built on the top of Fesole, and have admired both the beauties of the scenery and their picturesque delineation in the pages of the VOL. I. father of Italian prose. Nor did I fail to linger for many an hour in the villa at Fesole, where Lorenzo de' Medici, with his lettered friends Pico de Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano, passed his attic days. But when my mind was in a mood of more than ordinary seriousness, I used to fly from the splendours of Florence, from the leggiadre maniere and the bellezze di donne et donzelle, to the solitudes of Vallambrosa. Ariosto has celebrated the religion and hospitality of the Benedictine monks of the Vallambrosan abbey: Vallambrosa Cosi fu nominata una badia, Some sublimer bard must describe the solemn magnificence and the gloomy grandeur of its Apennine scenery. (78) But to pass from the natural into the intellectual world, the proper subject of my contemplations, nowhere did I find the delights of literature more numerous and rich than in Tuscany. Florence is now in the third century of its intellectual greatness. I cannot speak of Machiavelli and Guiccardini, the two most illustrious Florentines when I was in the city, without thinking of the men in whose track they followed. I cannot regard the scholars of the fifteenth century, without enquir ing whether they were the first great men of their country, and whether they shone with original or borrowed splendour. The mind then ascends to another age, and beholds with profoundest interest Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. Before their time, indeed, a few faint glimmerings of light had shot across the darkness; but the literary glories of Florence and of Italy commence in reality with this triumvirate; and at the hazard of saying many things that may be found scattered in other works, I shall relate in this chapter the circumstances of their lives, and also attempt to appreciate their literary characters. The history of literature, as connected with the Medicean family, will form the subject of the next division. DANTE. DANTE, or more properly Durante Alighieri, was born at Florence in the year 1265. His family was of distinction and wealth, and his education was, therefore, liberal. Brunetto Latini, a Florentine, and who is described as a master of all the science of the age, instructed him in the elementary branches of knowledge. Dante |