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If, however, Dante is on the whole inferior to Milton in poetry pure and simple, he is more important as a representative of a great era of mankind. In him the Middle Age lives as it does in its cathedrals; and when the cathedrals have crumbled, theDivine Comedy will be as fresh as it is now. Nor is this significance merely historical or antiquarian. From the very first it was appreciated by contemporaries. Repentant Florence endowed lectures upon theDivine Comedy, and Boccaccio was the first lecturer. In the next century Frezzi tries to transpose it into another key; and Attavanti cites from the pulpit Dantes ille noster as copiously and reverentially as any of the Fathers. Even in the age of the Renaissance, Pius the Fourth’s cardinals cap quotations from Dante as the last notes of Palestrina’s Mass of Pope Marcellus die down the aisles of St Peter’s. If he afterwards fell into comparative abeyance for a time, it must be remembered that Italy lay prostrate in the seventeenth century, and that his genius did not sort well with the especial mission assigned to her in the eighteenth.