glish, or at most an English and German poet, and
Dante exclusively an Italian. In 1900 they had both become world poets.
Shakspere's foreign conquests were the earlier and are still the wider,
as wide perhaps as the expanse--

"That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne."

But the ground that Dante has won he holds with equal secureness. Not
that he will ever be popular, in Shakspere's way; and yet it is far gone
when the aesthete in a comic opera is described as a "Francesca da Rimini
young man."

As a stimulus to creative work the influence of Dante, though not
entirely absent, is not conspicuous in the first half of the century. It
is not until the time of the Rossettis in England and of Longfellow and
Dr. Parsons in America that any poetry of a really Dantesque inspiration
and, at the same time, of high original value was added to our
literature.[18]

The first fruits of the Dante revival in England, in the shape of
original production, was Leigh Hunt's "Story of Rimini" (1816)--"Mr.
Hunt's smutty story of Rimini," as the Tory wits of _Blackwood_ were fond
of calling it in their onslaughts upon the Cockney school. This was a
romaunt in four cantos upon the already familiar episode of Francesca,
that "lily in the mouth of Tartarus." Hunt took Dryden's "Fables" as his
model in versification, employing the heroic couplet with the frequent
variation of the triplet and the alexandrine. The poem is not at all
Dantesque in its lax and fluent sweetness, and in that colloquial,
familiar manner which is constant in all Hunt's writing, both prose and
verse; reminding one, at its best, of Chaucer, who was, indeed, one of
his favourite masters. Hunt softens the ferocity of the tale as given by
Boccaccio, according to whom the husband Giovanni Malatesta was a
cripple, and killed the lovers _in flagrante delicto_. Hunt makes him a
personable man, though of proud and gloomy temper. He slays his brother
Paolo in chivalrous fashion and in single combat, and Francesca dies of a
broken heart. The descriptive portions of the "Story of Rimini" are
charming: the feudal procession with trumpeters, heralds, squires, and
knights, sent to escort home the bride, the pine forest outside Ravenna,
and the garden at Rimini in which the lovers used to meet--

"Places of nestling green for poets made."

Hunt had a quick eye for colour; a fondness, not altogether free from
affectation, for dainty phrases; and a feminine love of