period. She writes: "How can you
profess to be charmed with the few faint outlines of landscape painting
in Dante, who are blind to the beautiful, distinct, and profuse scenery
in the pages of Ossian?" She goes on to complain that the poem, in its
English dress, is vulgar and obscure.

Coleridge devoted to Dante a part of his series of lectures given at
London in 1818, reading copious selections from Cary's version. The
translator had claimed, in his introduction, that the Florentine poet
"leaves to Homer and Shakespeare alone the power of challenging the
preeminence or equality." Coleridge emphasized the "endless, subtle
beauties of Dante"; the vividness, logical connection, strength, and
energy of his style. In this he pronounced him superior to Milton; and
in picturesqueness he affirmed that he surpassed all other poets ancient
or modern. With characteristic penetration he indicated the precise
position of Dante in mediaeval literature; his poetry is "the link
between religion and philosophy"; it is "christianized, but without the
further Gothic accession of proper chivalry"; it has that "inwardness
which . . . distinguishes all the classic from all the modern poetry."
It was perhaps in consequence of Coleridge's praise that Cary's
translation went into its second edition in 1819, the year following this
lecture course. A third was published in 1831. Italians used to
complain that the foreign reader's knowledge of the "Divine Comedy" was
limited to the "Inferno," and generally to the Ugolino and Francesca
passages. Coleridge's quotations are all from the "Inferno," and Lowell
thinks that he had not read beyond it. He testified that the Ugolino and
Francesca stories were already "so well known and admired that it would
be pedantry to analyse them." Sir Joshua Reynolds had made a painting of
the former subject. In 1800 William Blake produced a series of seven
engravings in illustration of the "Inferno." In 1817 Flaxman began his
illustrations of the whole "Commedia," extending to a hundred plates.[12]

In 1819-20 Byron was living at Ravenna, the place of Dante's death and
burial[13] and of the last years of his exile. He used to ride for hours
together through Ravenna's "immemorial wood," [14] and the associations
of the scene prompted him to put into English (March, 1820) the Francesca
episode, that "thing woven as out of rainbows on a ground of eternal
black." In the letter to Murray, sent with his tr