Professor Grandgent has here gathered various addresses and poems that cluster about the Dante celebration of 1921. Its eight essays range over a wide variety of topics, from an inspiring statement of Dante’s meaning for the twentieth century to a study of his prosody. The general reader will accordingly find it an attractive introduction to the “majesty” of Dante's thought, while the professional student of the subject will gain from it fresh interpretations and new light upon important scholarly details. Throughout the book are scattered fragments of translation from Dante's works and from his contemporaries’ poetry; the volume, moreover, begins with a sestina and ends with a sonnet, both of which reveal Professor Grandgent’s skill as an original poet.

A guidebook for students of Romance philology, this volume presents the phonetic and morphological principles that emerge from a study of the development of the ancient tongue into the standard of speech of today. Inasmuch as this language is in its origin mainly Tuscan, and especially Florentine, the examination has to do mostly with Florence and Tuscany, but other dialects are cited when they have at any period made contributions to the literary vocabulary. The discussion of inflectional forms really includes the more conspicuous changes in syntax. In the midst of a mass of detail the author has attempted to keep the fundamental outlines of his subject clear. He has tried also to explain the phenomena in the light of our present knowledge of phonetics and of linguistic history.

Long known as a brilliant scholar and a winning interpreter of Dante’s times to our modern era, Professor Grandgent now throws aside the academic gown and settles down for unhampered conversation in the best tradition of the essay. He will get your laugh when he recounts his droll anecdotes; he will get your delighted chuckle as he pokes sly fun at pedantic scholarship or national self-importance; he will leave you at the end with a glow of pleasure that makes you for days afterward recall brilliant paragraphs and sends you back to his pages to read them once more. In fine, here are personal essays as fragrant as the bottle of vermouth that figures in one delightful incident, a treat for all lovers of good talk.