A Second Supplement to Toynbee's Dante in English Literature

Paget Toynbee's Britain's Tribute to Dante in Literature and Art, A Chronological Record of 540 Years (c. 1380–1920) was published by the British Academy for the Dante Commemoration in 1921. Twenty-five years later F. P. Wilson published A Supplement to Toynbee's Dante in English Literature in Italian Studies III, pp. 50–64. This gave allusions from 1519 to 1610. Now that another twenty-five years have passed a further supplement may be acceptable, compiled by one who used to send such notes to the late Professor Wilson. (Mrs. Wilson informs me that she found no such Dante references among Professor Wilson's papers after his death.) Not surprisingly I have been able to add but one reference in the period covered by F. P. Wilson's Supplement, yet that reference is of especial interest since it concerns what is apparently the earliest record of a portrait of Dante in this country. It is, perhaps, unexpected to find Byron being referred to in Blackwood's as ‘our English Dante’ two years before he wrote The Prophecy of Dante; and to learn that the Hon. Robert Curzon carried with him on his travels in search of MSS in the Levant ‘a little Dante (printed on vellum)’. But Toynbee did his work with such thoroughness that one is gratified to discover anything that he missed

Art · Art history · Literature · Period (music · Portrait · Tribute · Classics · Early Modern Spanish Literature · History · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies · Renaissance Literature and Culture

• The Fall of Tydeus and the Failure of Satan

  George Butler•Comparative Literature Studies•2006

  Add to list