IN PREFACE "Siati raccomandato il mio Tesoro " (Inf. xv. 110). N the following pages will be found a collection of some of the most beautiful and most striking passages from the works of Dante. Prose is included as well as verse, and the Latin works are represented (though very sparingly, owing to their more or less controversial contents) as well as the Italian. The extracts are arranged for the most part in the natural order in which they occur in the several works. This arrangement has been adopted in preference to a classification according to subject, in order that each work might as far as possible be represented independently by itself. Moreover, in the case of a writer of such wide range as Dante, subject classification would hardly have proved effective, not at any rate as applied to the present selections. Several of the longer episodes from the Divina Commedia (which in their entirety, each as a single whole, would have been out of proportion to the rest of the book) have been introduced by the expedient of breaking them up (when this could |