imitation of his works. Withdraw from subsequent poetry the images,
mythology, and characters of the _Iliad_, and what would remain?
Petrarch spent his best years in restoring his verses. Tasso portrayed
the siege of Jerusalem, and the shock of Europe and Asia, almost
exactly as Homer had done the contest of the same forces, on the same
shores, two thousand five hundred years before. Milton's old age, when
blind and poor, was solaced by hearing the verses recited of the poet,
to whose conceptions his own mighty spirit had been so much indebted;
and Pope deemed himself fortunate in devoting his life to the
translation of the _Iliad_.

No writer in modern times has equalled the wide-spread fame of the
Grecian bard; but it may be doubted whether, in the realms of thought,
and in sway over the reflecting world, the influence of DANTE has not
been almost as considerable. Little more than five hundred years,
indeed, have elapsed--not a sixth of the thirty centuries which have
tested the strength of the Grecian patriarch--since the immortal
Florentine poured forth his divine conceptions; but yet there is
scarcely a writer of eminence since that time, in works even bordering
on imagination, in which traces of his genius are not to be found. The
_Inferno_ has penetrated the world. If images of horror are sought
after, it is to his works that all subsequent ages have turned; if
those of love and divine felicity are desired, all turn to the
_Paradise_ and the _Spirit of Beatrice_. When the historians of the
French Revolution wished to convey an idea of the utmost agonies they
were called on to portray, they contented themselves with saying it
equalled all that the imagination of Dante had conceived of the
terrible. Sir Joshua Reynolds has exerted his highest genius in
depicting the frightful scene described by him, when Ugolino perished
of hunger in the tower of Pisa. Alfieri, Metastasio, Corneille, Lope
de Vega, and all the great masters of the tragic muse, have sought in
his works the germs of their finest conceptions. The first of these
tragedians marked two-thirds of the _Inferno_ and _Paradiso_ as worthy
of being committed to memory. Modern novelists have found in his
prolific mind the storehouse from which they have drawn their noblest
imagery, the chord by which to strike the profoundest feelings of the
human heart. Eighty editions of his poems have been published in
Europe within the last half century; and the public admir