CURRENT LITERATURE.
The New Life of Dante Alighieri. Translated by Charles Eliot Norton. (Macmillan and Co.)—The Vita Nuova is the most fitting introduction to the study of Dante, and Mr. Norton, having already published a prose translation of the " Divine Comedy," now reprints this version of the New Life, which was made, he tells us, when he was a young man, nearly forty years ago. The sonnets and canzoni are done into English metre with considerable grace and skill, but the version as a whole can hardly compete with that of Dante Rossetti, who had peculiar qualifications for the task of interpreting the great Florentine to English readers. In poetical quality his rendering seems to us greatly superior to Mr. Norton's. The value of the present work is increased by the addition of essays and notes, which supply, in a scholarly form, all the commentary that can be necessary to a student of the original.
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