Certainly he was in the fourteenth century revered as a great teacher, a mine of philosophical and theological lore. Like Virgil, his master, he came to be regarded as the wisest man of his epoch, a prodigy of recondite learning. Like Virgil, too, he was even supposed by some to be a sorcerer, an imputation to which, in those days, any extraordinary scholar was liable. Learned and wise he truly was; an indefatigable student, eager to impart to mankind his hard-won stores; a close and subtle thinker, with a strong bent for abstract doctrine; an accomplished astronomer, fond of setting his reader intricate scientific puzzles. But all this erudition and speculation, which appealed so mightily to the utilitarian and argumentative spirit of his contemporaries and immediate followers, usually appears to modern readers dry and tiresome, and much of it is skipped by the profane. We are utilitarian enough, to be sure; but the greater part of Dante's erudition has lost its immediate utility, and most of his philosophy seems to the uninitiated to be out of key with present-day modes of thought.

Virgil and Ovid were, in Dante's day, held in high repute as allegorists, and were eagerly studied for the intricate hidden lessons that might be extracted from their verses. Dante really was an allegorist, and as such was justly esteemed. But his early commentators read into his work, as into that of Ovid and Virgil, all sorts of minute secondary meanings that were not there. Just as Christian preachers, from time immemorial, have

given to separate verses in the Bible any significance that might at the moment suit their fancy, so Dante expositors have found in single phrases and incidents of their author whatever their particular hobby suggested. This practice has continued, both for the Bible and for the Divine Comedy, down to our own day. But in the fourteenth century the interpretations of both books nearly always took an allegorical turn. At present, generally speaking, we care little for allegory, which, when it does not bore us, puzzles and baffles us. Probably few modern readers of Dante are really interested in his symbolism, except in its broadest outlines.

Two attributes, then, which fascinated Dante's contemporaries-utility and symbolic inventiveness- have lost a large portion of their spell. But there are enough left; and some of them, no doubt, are more effective to-day than they were six hundred years ago. His uncompromising faith and his rigid code of morals have now become so rare as to assume the interest of strangeness, whereas in the author's own era they were matters of course. His pronounced temperament is probably more appreciated in our epoch of aggressive individualism than in his own communal age. The course of his life, which furnished him with the experience that he translated into poetry, seems nowadays extraordinarily diversified, but was normal enough then. The clearness and comprehensiveness of both his physical and his intellectual sight are a wonder fit to appeal potently

to the fourteenth century as to the twentieth; possibly the twentieth, which has been schooled by a long series of intervening talents to follow the higher flights of the imagination, contemplates this wonder more intelligently than did the fourteenth. As to the deep symbolism of his primal conception, and the unparalleled unity and symmetry with which he developed it, I am inclined to think that, on the whole, the fourteenth century readers were more competent judges than the twentieth century public; partly because, having far less to read than the people of our day, they read more closely and thoughtfully; partly because symbolism and symmetry were ever before them, mystic symbolism as the basis of their religious service and their whole outlook on the world, richly diversified symmetry as the underlying principle of their eccleciastical architecture at a time when the church was the one great meeting-place of the community. On the other hand, I believe that the really sympathetic specialist of to-day comprehends the poet's conception more clearly than did the best qualified specialist of the Trecento; I believe that Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Edward Moore, alien though they were in race, time, and faith, grasped Dante's fundamental idea more closely than did Boccaccio or Benvenuto da Imola, the reason being that the modern interpreters possessed a broader experience in literature and had at their disposal the results of centuries of study of their author. Dante's technical skill - his use of harmony and contrast,

suspense, surprise, climax, of metaphor and simile, his choice of words was as astounding to his age as it is to ours; even more astounding, because it was then something quite unprecedented in modern literature. Though Dante as a craftsman is still unsurpassed, he has in the course of six centuries found a few fellows; in his own day he had none nearer than Virgil and Ovid, who were thirteen hundred years away.

It is to these elements of Dante's power that I intend to devote my eight lectures: Faith, Morality, Temperament, Experience, Vision, Conception, Workmanship, Diction. I hope by the discussion of these themes, and especially by the citation of illustrative passages from the author hmself, to throw some light on the secret of the lasting poetic supremacy of a man who not only lived six hundred years ago, but distinctly belonged to his own epoch- an epoch whose ideas and interests seem so remote from ours.

Before I enter upon the subject of Faith, which is to be my text to-day, I must make one more preliminary remark. I spoke, a moment ago, of the diverse habits of reading in the Middle Ages and now. Remember this: Dante must be read in the medieval way. He must be read slowly (if possible, aloud), intently, ponderingly, repeatedly. Whosoever tries to speed through him as one rushes through the season's best seller, gets nothing, or next to nothing. We have almost lost the art of reading. So prodigious is the mass of printed matter which year by year, month

by month, day by day, obtrudes itself on our at tention, and with which we feel in some fashion obliged to acquire at least a semblance of familiarity, that we have formed the habit of skimming, of leaping from peak to peak, instead of following the road up hill and down dale; and honest, thorough perusal has for most of us become nearly inpossible. Chief blame for our mental degeneracy falls on the daily paper, I say nothing of the Sunday paper, which contains no news and therefore need corrupt only those willing to be corrupted, but the daily paper, which we have to examine, to learn what is going on in the world, -the daily paper, which, with its preposterous bulk, its interminable long-windedness, its chaotic arrangement, forces us to practice every day for an hour or so a system of violent intellectual gymastics adopted by us for the purpose of winnowing the few grains of corn which we assume to be there from the enormous mass of chaff which we know is there. That is, we engage every day on a struggle to extricate from a formless and mostly void heap of print the few things we want while reading just as little as possible of the things that are of no interest. This method, slightly relaxed, we carry into our perusal of the weekly short-story periodical, to which we have been lured by the illustrations. With only a little diminution of tenseness, we apply it to the monthly magazine. Then, if we ever have time to read a book, the habit has become such a second nature that we find ourselves dodging from page to page,