The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Translated by Charles Eliot Norton.

8° (188 x 124mm). [2], xxvi, [2], 193, [3]; ix, [3], 216, [4]; ix, [3], 215, [1] pages. Uniform original editorial binding in green percaline. Smooth spines, with title, imprint and volume numbering in gilt lettering. Light damaged the headband, corners slightly abrased. A very good copy. Pencilled and inked underlinings and annotations, a few in Norton's own hand. On the recto of the front flyleaf, Charles Eliot Norton's autograph noteby the translator Charles Eliot Norton: 'Io vo parlando dell'amica vostra Bene è sua amica Nobilitade. Convito ad fin. Charles Eliot Norton Shady Hill 13 Dec. 1898.'.

A fine copy, with Norton's autograph note on the flyleaf, of the first edition of the prose translation by the great Dantean scholar Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), a friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and co-founder of the famous Dante Society. "So many versions of the Divine Comedy exist in English that a new one might well seem needless. But most of these translations are in verse, and the intellectual temper of our time is impatient of a transmutation in which substance is sacrified for form's sake, and the new form is itself different from the original” (vol. i p. xi). Norton was, together with Longfellow, the ambassador for the cult of Dante in the United States.