Note 589 — Chapter XVI
Reading edition
But it is also Boccaccio who seems to suggest that Dante may have come to England, to Oxford. This visit Tiraboschi supposed to stand merely on the assertion of Giovanni di Serravalle (1416-17), who says Dante had studied "Paduæ, Bononiæ, demum Oxoniis et Parisiis"; but in the Carme, which accompanied the copy of the Divine Comedy Boccaccio sent to Petrarch (Corazzini, op. cit., p. 53), he shows us Dante led by Apollo:—
"per celsa nivosi Cyrreos, mediosque sinus tacitosque recessus Naturæ, cœlique vias, terræque, marisque Aonios fontes, Parnasi culmen et antra Julia, Parisios dudum, extremosque Britannos."
Cf. Mazzinghi, A Brief Notice of Recent Researches respecting Dante (1844), quoted by Paget Toynbee, Dante in English Literature (Methuen, 1909), Vol. II, p. 696 et seq.