May 27.--The anniversary of the birth at Florence, in the year 1265, of
DANTE ALIGHIERI, the great father of Italian, and, it may almost be
said, of modern European poetry. Dante, whose family was of noble
descent, was carefully educated in all the learning of his age, and
began to compose Latin poetry in his boyhood. Fortunately he
relinquished the use of that language when he grew older, and applied
himself to composition in his native Tuscan tongue--a circumstance not
more fortunate for his own fame than for the literature of his country
and the world. His life, passed among the political agitations of the
time, was a busy, turbulent, and, upon the whole, unhappy one; the party
in the state to which he attached himself having been defeated by their
opponents, and he himself sentenced to be burnt alive--a fate from which
he only preserved himself by remaining in banishment, and flying from
one place of refuge to another. It was while he was thus a proscribed
exile and wanderer that he is supposed to have written his famous
‘Commedia Divina, or Vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise,’ a poem
which has ranked him with the greatest masters of his art. He finally
settled at Ravenna, and died there on the 14th of September, 1321, after
a short illness, in the extremity of which he composed his own epitaph,
in six rhyming Latin hexameters, which were engraved upon his tomb.
Byron, in the fourth canto of ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,’ alludes to
the foreign death and sepulchre of the great poet in the following
lines:--
“Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar,
Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore;
Thy factions, in their worse than civil war,
Proscribed the bard whose name for evermore
Their children’s children would in vain adore
With the remorse of ages.”
An old author mentions an anecdote of Dante, which forcibly illustrates
the studious ardour of his mind. Having gone one day to the house of a
bookseller, from one of whose windows he was to be a spectator of a
public show exhibited in the square below, he by chance took up a book,
in which he soon got so absorbed that on returning home, after the
spectacle was over, he solemnly declared he had neither seen nor heard
anything whatever of all that had taken place before his eyes.
May 28.--The birth-day of the late Right Honourable WILLIAM PITT, second
son of the great Earl of Chatham, who was born in 1759. He was the
favourite of his father, who even in his childhood, it is said, used to
place him before him on a table, and encourage him to harangue with
oratorical form and solemnity. He afterwards used to attend the debates
in the House of Commons, where it was his practice, in listening to all
the more distinguished speakers, to consider how every successive
argument they used might be answered. He was educated for the bar, and
went the western circuit once or twice; but being introduced into
Parliament almost as soon as he was of age, he forthwith abandoned
everything else for politics. On the dissolution of the Rockingham
administration, in 1782, Mr. Pitt became Chancellor of the Exchequer,
while yet little more than twenty-two years of age; and before the close
of the following year he was prime-minister. From this period his life
belongs to the history of his country, whose affairs he continued to
direct, with the exception of the three years, from 1801 to 1804, till
his death, in the forty-seventh year of his age, on the 23d of January,
1806. No man ever gave himself up more entirely to his high office than
Mr. Pitt did. To his public duties he sacrificed alike his health and
his fortune; and, owing to entire inattention to his private affairs,
died not only poor, but encumbered with heavy debts, which Parliament
voted a grant of money to pay.
May 29.--_The Restoration of King Charles II._--By an act of parliament
made in the twelfth year of the reign of Charles II. (the year of his
restoration), the church still celebrates the return to the throne of
this monarch.
May 31.--_Ascension Day. Holy Thursday._--On this day the church
celebrates the ascension of Our Saviour. It is usual for the bounds of
parishes to be perambulated on this festival.
June 1.--The birth-day of the celebrated French painter, NICOLAS
POUSSIN, who was born at Andelys, in Normandy, in 1594. Poussin, whose
family was poor, though ancient and respectable, endured many privations
and hardships while studying his art, and, before his merits had become
known, was frequently reduced to such straits as to be obliged to sell
his pictures for little more than what the colours had cost him. But,
even after he attained celebrity, Poussin made but little money, and
lived in great simplicity. It is he of whom it is told, that having one
evening received a visit from a certain bishop, he was lighting him down
stairs himself, when the bishop said, “I much pity you, Poussin, that
you have not one servant.”--“And I you, my Lord,” replied the painter,
“that you have so many.” Poussin died at Rome, in 1665, at the age of
seventy-one.
[Illustration: Nicolas Poussin.]
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THE BRITISH MUSEUM.--No. 2.