Two notable centenaries fall in the present year. On August 6th, 1221, passed to his reward Dominic Guzman. Almost exactly one hundred years later, in July or September, 1321, the world’s greatest poet since ancient times left a world which had treated him hardly in order to make trial of the justice of a world he had hymned in almost inspired numbers.

Perhaps to a Catholic it is not fanciful to trace a connection between the two, yet few indeed outside the Church consider what the poet owed to the famigliar di Christo and his sons, whose praises are written in the greatest of his works. Dante Aligheri was born in 1265 ; he was a child of nine when Thomas Aquinas died, a boy of fifteen when the Doctor Universal, Albertus Magnus, passed to join his great pupil. His days were passed in wild times. The year of his birth saw the long strife in England between king and baronage culminate in the battle of Evesham, saw Manfred, king of Naples and Sicily, defeated and slain by Charles of Anjou. He was seventeen years old when the bad blood between Frenchman and Neapolitan found outlet in the Sicilian Vespers and the weary reign of anarchy which followed. In 1310, he saw the suppression of the Order of Knights Templars (so typical a product of the age of faith and chivalry), and in the prime of his years he lived amid the wars and rumours of wars, the intrigues, the treacheries in which his native Florence was involved, the long-drawn-out strife of Guelph and Ghibelline.

On all sides the old order was passing and many of the mediæval theories becoming empty of meaning. The glory which had surrounded the Holy Roman Empire seemed waning, while powerful nation-states arose to dispute its supremacy.