The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866, page 39 by Various Authors
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The last stanza ever inscribed to Shakespeare by Landor was sent to me with the following preface: "An old man sends the last verses he has written, or probably he may ever write to ---- ----."
"SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY.
"Beyond our shores, beyond the Apennines, Shakespeare, from heaven came thy creative breath! 'Mid citron grove and overarching vines Thy genius wept at Desdemona's death: In the proud sire thou badest anger cease, And Juliet by her Romeo sleep in peace. Then rose thy voice above the stormy sea, And Ariel flew from Prospero to thee.
"July 1, 1860."
Dante was not one of Landor's favorites, although he was quite ready to allow the greatness of il gran poeta. He had no sympathy with what he said was very properly called a comedy. He would declare that about one sixth only of Dante was intelligible or pleasurable. Turning to Landor's writings, I find that in his younger days he was even less favorable to Dante. In the "Pentemeron" (the author spelling it so) he, in the garb of Petrarch, asserts that "at least sixteen parts in twenty of the Inferno and Purgatorio are detestable both in poetry and principle; the higher parts are excellent, indeed." Dante's powers of language, he allows, "are prodigious; and, in the solitary places where he exerts his force rightly, the stroke is irresistible. But how greatly to be pitied must he be who can find nothing in Paradise better than sterile theology! and what an object of sadness and consternation he who rises up from hell like a giant refreshed!" While allowing his wonderful originality, Landor goes so far as to call him "the great master of the disgusting"! Dante is not sympathetic.
Yet he wrote the glorious episode of Francesca da Rimini, of which Landor's Boccaccio says: "Such a depth of intuitive judgment, such a delicacy of perception, exists not in any other work of human genius; and from an author who, on almost all occasions, in this part of the work, betrays a deplorable want o