the first complete translation of the "Comedy"
into English was made by Henry Boyd, a clergyman of the Irish Church; the
"Inferno" in 1785 (with a specimen from Ariosto); the whole in 1802.
Boyd was a quite obscure person, author among other things of a
Spenserian poem entitled "The Woodman's Tale," and his translation
attracted little notice. In his introduction he compares Dante with
Homer, and complains that "the venerable old bard . . . has been long
neglected"; perhaps, he suggests, because his poem could not be tried by
Aristotle's rules or submitted to the usual classical tests.

"Since the French, the restorers of the art of criticism, cast a damp
upon original invention, the character of Dante has been thrown under a
deeper shade. That agreeable and volatile nation found in themselves an
insuperable aversion to the gloomy and romantic bard, whose genius,
ardent, melancholy, and sublime, was so different from their own."

Boyd used a six-lined stanza, a singularly ill chosen medium for
rendering the _terza rima_; and his diction was as wordy and vague as
Dante's is concise and sharp of edge. A single passage will illustrate
his manner:

"So full the symphony of grief arose,
My heart, responsive to the lovers' woes,
With thrilling sympathy convulsed my breast.
Too strong at last for life my passion grew,
And, sickening at the lamentable view,
I fell like one by mortal pangs oppressed." [10]

The first opportunity which the mere English reader had to form any real
notion of Dante, was afforded by Henry Francis Cary's translation in
blank verse (the "Inferno," with the Italian text in 1805; the entire
"Commedia" in 1814, with the title "The Vision of Hell, Purgatory, and
Paradise"). This was a work of talent, if not of genius; and in spite of
the numerous versions in prose and verse that have since appeared, it
continues the most current and standard Dante in England, if not in
America, where Longfellow naturally challenges precedence. The public
was as yet so unprepared to appreciate Dante that Cary's work received
little attention until brought into notice by Coleridge; and the
translator was deeply chagrined by the indifference, not to say
hostility, with which his labours were acknowledged. In the memoir[11]
of Cary by his son there is a letter from Anne Seward--the Swan of
Lichfield--which throws a singular light upon the critical taste of the
"snug coterie and literary lady" of the