Dn 171.2.2 £2 171.2.2 (1, Wm. Warren Berm Danite Suc DRYDEN PRESS: J. DAVY AND SONS, 137, LONG ACRE, LONDON, W. 2012. 17 To the Memory OF THE VERY REVEREND RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH, D.C.L. Dean of St. Paul's, DEDICATED, WITH A DEEP SENSE OF GRATITUDE AND REVERENCE, BY WILLIAM WARREN VERNON January, 1894. y Readings on the Purgatorio (London, Macmillan, 1889, 2 vols.), as therein. M explained, grew out of a series of lectures to a few private friends at Florence. The kind reception given to that work since its publication has encouraged me to produce the present book, which deals with the Inferno, and I trust that life and ability may be vouchsafed me to cope with the mystic beauties of the Paradiso, and to complete this attempt to make plain to a beginner the difficulties of the three immortal cantiche. The first edition of the Readings on the Purgatorio being now exhausted, I have begun to prepare a second edition, which will be re-modelled and almost entirely re-written. In printing these volumes, my intention has not been to enter into rivalry with the many excellent prose translations now accessible to the English reader, but I venture to claim the merit of a certain novelty of plan and execution. The Readings on the Purgatorio, as the late Dean Church pointed out in his beautiful Introduction, are practically lectures to students. They take the English reader for the first time step by step with the poet throughout his dread pilgrimage. They endeavour to make clear the difficulties of language, the obscurities, the vague historical and literary references, and to afford a clue to the extraordinary topographical embarrassments which meet the reader at every turn. My method has been to deal with the text a few lines at a time, and to give a literal translation of it, while a running commentary and a plentiful supply of parallel passages, with notes and illustrations drawn from ancient and modern commentators, show the order and method of the narrative, as |