Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. _PREFATORY NOTE_ Dante Gabriel Rossetti, being the son of an Italian who was greatly immersed in the study of Dante Alighieri, and who produced a Comment on the _Inferno_, and other books relating to Dantesque literature, was from his earliest childhood familiar with the name of the stupendous Florentine, and to some extent aware of the range and quality of his writings. Nevertheless—or perhaps indeed it may have been partly on that very account—he did not in those opening years read Dante to any degree worth mentioning: he was well versed in Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Byron, and some other writers, years before he applied himself to Dante. He may have been fourteen years of age, or even fifteen (May 1843), before he took seriously to the author of the _Divina Commedia_. He then read him eagerly, and with the profoundest admiration and delight; and from the _Commedia_ he proceeded to the lyrical poems and the _Vita Nuova_. I question whether he ever read—unless in the most cursory way—other and less fascinating writings of Alighieri, such as the _Convito_ and the _De Monarchiâ_. From reading, Rossetti went on to translating. He translated at an early age, chiefly between 1845 and 1849, a great number of poems by the Italians contemporary with Dante, or preceding him; and, among other things, he made a version of the whole _Vita Nuova_, prose and verse. This may possibly have been the first important thing that he translated from the Italian: if not the first, still less was it the last, and it may well be that his rendering of the book was completed within the year 1846, or early in 1847. He did not, of course, leave his version exactly as it had come at first: on the contrary, he took counsel with friends (Alfred Tennyson among the number), toned down crudities and juvenilities, and worked to make the whole thing impressive and artistic—for in such matters he was much more chargeable with over-fastidiousness than with laxity. Still, the work, as we now have it, is essentially the work of those adolescent years—from time to time reconsidered and improved, but not transmuted. Some few years after producing his translation of the _Vita Nuova_, Rossetti was desirous of publishing it, and of illustrating the volume with etchings from various designs, which he had meanwhile done, of incidents in the story. This project, however, had to be laid aside, owing to want of means, and the etchings were never undertaken. It was only in 1861 that the volume named _The Early Italian Poets_, including the translated _Vita Nuova_, was brought out: the same volume, with a change in the arrangement of its contents, was reissued in 1874, entitled _Dante and his Circle_. This book, in its original form, was received with favour, and settled the claim of Rossetti to rank as a poetic translator, or indeed as a poet in his own right. For _The Early Italian Poets_ he wrote a Preface, from which a passage, immediately relating to the _Vita Nuova_, is extracted in the present edition. There are some other passages, affecting the whole of the translations in that volume, which deserve to be borne in mind, as showing the spirit in which he undertook the translating work, and I give them here:— “The life-blood of rhythmical translation is this commandment—that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one. The only true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation, as far as possible, with...