It is scarcely necessary to say that those qualities which escaped the notice of the poet himself were not likely to attract the attention of the commentators.

The fact is, that, while the public homage was paid to some absurdities with which his works may be justly charged, and to many more which were falsely imputed to them,--while lecturers were paid to expound and eulogise his physics, his metaphysics, his theology, all bad of their kind--while annotators laboured to detect allegorical meanings of which the author never dreamed, the great powers of his imagination, and the incomparable force of his style, were neither admired nor imitated.
Arimanes had prevailed.

The Divine Comedy was to that age what St.
Paul's Cathedral was to Omai.

The poor Otaheitean stared listlessly for a moment at the huge cupola, and ran into a toyshop to play with beads.
Italy, too, was charmed with literary trinkets, and played with them for four centuries.
From the time of Petrarch to the appearance of Alfieri's tragedies, we may trace in almost every page of Italian literature the influence of those celebrated sonnets which, from the nature both of their beauties and their faults, were peculiarly unfit to be models for general imitation.

Almost all the poets of that period, however different in the degree and quality of their talents, are characterised by great exaggeration, and as a necessary consequence, great coldness of sentiment; by a passion for frivolous and tawdry ornament; and, above all, by an extreme feebleness and diffuseness of style.