55.) In Purgatorio Dante says: "My name as yet marks no great sound,"
but he boasts that he will surpass in fame the Guidos, writers of verse:
"Perchance some one is already born who will drive both from out the
nest." He is so sure that posterity will confer immortality upon his
work that he does not hesitate to make himself sixth among the greatest
writers of the world. This passage occurs when he enters Limbus
accompanied by Virgil to whom a group of spirits, Homer, Horace, Ovid,
and Lucan, make salutation. (Inf., IV, 76.) Posterity has bestowed
greater renown on Dante's name than even he presumed to hope, for it
has placed him in the Court of Letters with only one of the writers
of antiquity, Homer, and with two subsequent writers, Cervantes
and Shakespeare.

Naturally we think that a writer who was so positively confident and
boastful of his powers must have been given to pride and Dante indeed
plainly indicates to us that he was guilty of this. But it was pride,
we think, that was honorable and not a vice, a pride of which a lesser
light, Lacordaire says, "By the grace of God, I abhor mediocrity." In
the dark wood Dante represents the Lion (Pride) as preventing him from
ascending the mountain--"He seemed to be coming to me with head upreared
and with such raging hunger, that the air appeared to be in fear of
him." (Inf., I, 43.)

And that the poet's trepidation was justified he later makes known
(Purg. XI, 136) when he expresses the fear that for pride he may be
eternally punished. Perhaps it was because Dante recognized the pride of
his learning, of his ancestry, of his associations with distinguished
personages as his besetting sin that he exercised his skill as a master
in showing us profound imagery representing the characteristics of
pride. Carved out of the mountain in the first circle of a terrace of