Two notable centenaries fall in the present year. On August 6th, 1221, passed to his reward Dominic Guzman. Almost exactly one hundred years later, in July or September, 1321, the world’s greatest poet since ancient times left a world which had treated him hardly in order to make trial of the justice of a world he had hymned in almost inspired numbers.

Perhaps to a Catholic it is not fanciful to trace a connection between the two, yet few indeed outside the Church consider what the poet owed to the famigliar di Christo and his sons, whose praises are written in the greatest of his works. Dante Aligheri was born in 1265 ; he was a child of nine when Thomas Aquinas died, a boy of fifteen when the Doctor Universal, Albertus Magnus, passed to join his great pupil. His days were passed in wild times. The year of his birth saw the long strife in England between king and baronage culminate in the battle of Evesham, saw Manfred, king of Naples and Sicily, defeated and slain by Charles of Anjou. He was seventeen years old when the bad blood between Frenchman and Neapolitan found outlet in the Sicilian Vespers and the weary reign of anarchy which followed. In 1310, he saw the suppression of the Order of Knights Templars (so typical a product of the age of faith and chivalry), and in the prime of his years he lived amid the wars and rumours of wars, the intrigues, the treacheries in which his native Florence was involved, the long-drawn-out strife of Guelph and Ghibelline.

On all sides the old order was passing and many of the mediæval theories becoming empty of meaning. The glory which had surrounded the Holy Roman Empire seemed waning, while powerful nation-states arose to dispute its supremacy.

“Heavy volumes of commentary and exegesis,” we are told of Lord Melbourne in a fascinating book, “he examined with scrupulous diligence; and at any odd moment he might be found turning over the pages of the Bible. To the ladies whom he most liked he would lend some learned work on the Revelation, crammed with marginal notes in his own hand.” The Revelation of Saint John, with introduction and notes by William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, would not be lacking in interest; it would at least be curious to see what one whom Mr. Strachey describes as a man of perpetual compromises, an autumn rose, a sceptical believer, ambiguous in everything, could make of a book of such intense faith, flaming certitudes, and crashing decisions. The seeming chaos of the Apocalypse has left many a man floundering for his reason. No book in the world has been more commented on than this last of the books of the Bible, and none has had a greater variety of commentators. And we may add the remark—due, I think, to Mr. Chesterton—that, despite all the wild and weird things John saw in his visions, he saw nothing so wild and weird as some of his own commentators. The insanely fantastic interpretations of Abbot Joachim (1202) and of the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra (1329) furnished the Reformers with arms in their anti-papal campaign. (It is at least in Calvin’s favour, as some one has remarked, that he had the sense to leave the book alone.)

It is one of the paradoxes of St. Bernard’s life that he, contemplative monk consecrated to silence, has left us more of his reported speech than most of his contemporaries. In his case speech was more golden than silence because he spoke the word of God. He was, if not a man of the world, at least a man of his century who saw clearly that men were drifting from God through ignorance. At a time when preaching was considered the peculiar duty of bishops and not the business of mere monks and priests, Bernard, monk and recluse, became a foremost preacher. It is true the bulk of his sermons that have survived the lapse of time were preached within the walls of his monastery, but we know that he was one of the first monks to bring preaching out of the cloister—witness his campaign in France and the Rhineland when he preached the Second Crusade. He was, indeed, a true precursor of the age that ushered in the Preaching Friar.

“All roads lead to Rome,” and all these roads bring tourists and pilgrims. The latter are the more interesting of the two classes although both are very often intermixed. The pilgrim, whether he is a religious pilgrim or an antiquarian one, at least knows what he ought to see, or wants to see, but the tourist merely sees sights that are there, those that come in his way, or are thrust upon him. Hence one gets priceless questions addressed generally to hotel concierges or guides. The writer himself heard an anxious American ask: “I say, can you tell me if there is anything to see in Rome?”

And for this class is there? They come without any interest or knowledge, and wonder what Roman history was all about. Did not (according to the legend) another American drive to Cook’s Tourist Office in the Piazza d’Espagna and demand a guide to show him “all Rome.” “How long are you going to stay?” asked the wily official. “Well, I guess about an hour and a half.” The official said this was insufficient for all Rome, but, as a carriage was on the spot, their guide could give the tourist the opportunity of a hasty visit to St. Peter’s, and to the Coliseum. Having driven off, they stopped at the latter. “Well,” said the American looking up at the ruin, “Which is this?”

To free a country is one thing. To consolidate it is another. In some cases the latter task is more difficult. Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, now reunited after centuries of separation, are fusing so violently that intermittent sparks often threaten conflagration. Freedom, and the application of true Liberal principles have put an end to political murders once endemic in the Balkans (we find them nearer home nowadays), but discord and local jealousy prevail. Each branch of the race has found out that the other is far from perfect, and the disappointment is extreme. At first, quarrelling was conducted in best parliamentary style.

“You won the war,” said Croat to Serb, with hyperbolic magnanimity. “We cannot forget the tremendous sacrifices you made. You are the first factor in our new State. You have great prestige and honour abroad. You are bound to dominate. There is little regard for us who are shoved altogether in the background.”

“Flatterer!” retorted the Serb, disconcerted at having his chief arguments forestalled and finding his merits arrayed against him. “Mine was but the rough work, and now it is your turn to shine. How can an uncouth soldier compete with you in the arts of peace? You are immeasurably beyond us in the higher paths of civilization. Croat savants, artists, scientists are proficient in all we had no time to think about. Why should you dread being swamped by the handful of us extant after the war?”

But the exchange of polite, bitter remarks soon gave place to envenomed diatribes, and the order of compliments was reversed. At the present moment opinion is sharply divided on the constitutional form of the new State.

Great is the difference between old things that are dead, and old things that live. And still greater between old institutions, however glorious, that have passed away for ever, and old institutions that, adapting themselvesto new conditions and environment, have continued in vigorous life unto our own day. Crowns and orbs and sceptres when collected in some dreary museum of antiquities interest but a few, and excite a very languid curiosity ; the feudal and medieval trappings of the British monarchy (ancient indeed, but still a power that counts for something in the world) appeal to the historic imagination of multitudes, and even fill them with enthusiasm. Who cares to read of the quaint but utterly dead constitutions of Venice and Genoa and Poland? But what student does not delight to study the time-honoured customs of the “Mother of Parliaments,” faithfully and scrupulously perpetuated in the legislative assemblies of the Dominions and the Commonwealths?

If the arduous and too often ungrateful task of translation be one of the sincerest tributes which can be paid to a great literary artist, the supreme poet of Catholic Christendom has no cause to complain of his treatment in this country, at any rate during the last century. With the exception of Homer, no poet has been so often and so painstakingly interpreted in English as Dante. Curiously enough, however, all the English versions of the Divina Commedia in its entirety, or of any one of the Canticles, have appeared in comparatively recent times. Until the close of the eighteenth century Dante was unduly neglected by most Englishmen, though Chaucer, Milton, and Gray were notable exceptions. However, his first translator worthy of the name, Henry Francis Cary, was, though virtually a pioneer, a very late one, born (in 1772) more than five centuries later than his “master and author.” Cary was the contemporary of Scott and Wordsworth and the friend of Charles Lamb and Coleridge; he was a quiet, scholarly clergyman, whom Lamb compared to Goldsmith’s Parson Primrose and honoured with his affection to the extent of getting harmlessly tipsy at his table.