end of
those concerned, wished to cover the hard fact of illicit love in an
ecstacy of human feeling. Dante, the supreme master of his age, the
incomparable lover of Beatrice, differentiated this tragedy from
countless incidents of like character which marked his age. Had the
story been preserved only in the form recorded by Boccaccio, it would
have been lost in its minor details of history; whereas Dante has
glorified it.

By the very fact that Dante places the two lovers in the circle of the
Lustful, it is clear that he realized the enormity of their sin.
The theory that his friendship with Guido Novella, the nephew of
Francesca, made Dante refrain from entering fully into the incident,
will not hold, when it is remembered that the cantos of the Inferno
were written in 1300, seventeen years before the poet reached Ravenna,
and accepted the hospitality of the Polenta house. Dante's infinite
compassion is, therefore, the cause for the compressed poetry of this
famous passage.

Dante's Francesca lines have been infinitely translated. Longfellow is
conscientious; Byron chafes to be freed of the original Italian, and
his lines are irksome; Rossetti sees and feels, but he is laboured.
Dante, infinitely translated, remains supreme.

The poems on this ideal love legend are of infinite variety. Tassoni
describes Paolo, the warrior, consumed with ravishing love, "shrunk
with misery;" he fails to reach the youthful passion, and is as
mediaevally chivalric as is Chaucer in "The Knightes Tale" of Palamon
and Arcite. Leigh Hunt resorts to stilted narrative and description.

Byron once thought to write a drama on this subject; had he done so,
Silvio Pellico might have had a formidable rival. More or less, all
the playwrights have gone to Italian history, and the more exact they
became, the more gross the situation. F. Marion Crawford fell on this
rock of accuracy, when he wrote his Francesca play for Mme. Sarah
Bernhardt.

Silvio Pellico, who wrote the first drama on "Francesca da Rimini"
known to modern playgoers, lived his early life in an intensely
religious atmosphere, and suffered imprisonment later because of his
patriotic tendencies; it is not surprising, therefore, to find in his
play--first a national appeal that was to win it applause from all
Italy, and then, more important still, a purity of tone that struggled
most nobly against an inevitable, passionate end. _Paolo_ is the
one who, after some scruples, succumbs;