Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers Volume I Part 2

Again, Petrarch says, "What an object of sadness and of consternation, he who rises up from h.e.l.l like a giant refreshed!

"_Boccaccio_. Strange perversion! A pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night, to guide no one. Paradise had fewer wants for him to satisfy than h.e.l.l had, all which he fed to repletion; but let us rather look to his poetry than his temper."

See also what is said in that admirable book further on (p. 50), respecting the most impious and absurd pa.s.sage in all Dante's poem, the a.s.sumption about Divine Love in the inscription over h.e.l.l-gate--one of those monstrosities of conception which none ever had the effrontery to pretend to vindicate, except theologians who profess to be superior to the priests of Moloch, and who yet defy every feeling of decency and humanity for the purpose of explaining their own worldly, frightened, or hard-hearted submission to the mistakes of the most wretched understandings. Ugo Foscolo, an excellent critic where his own temper and violence did not interfere, sees nothing but jealousy in Petrarch's dislike of Dante, and nothing but Jesuitism in similar feelings entertained by such men as Tiraboschi. But all gentle and considerate hearts must dislike the rage and bigotry in Dante, even were it true (as the Dantesque Foscolo thinks) that Italy will never be regenerated till one-half of it is baptised in the blood of the other![29] Such men, with all their acuteness, are incapable of seeing what can be effected by n.o.bler and serener times, and the progress of civilisation. They fancy, no doubt, that they are vindicating the energies of Nature herself, and the inevitable necessity of "doing evil that good may come." But Dante in so doing violated the Scripture he professed to revere; and men must not a.s.sume to themselves that final knowledge of results, which is the only warrant of the privilege, and the possession of which is to be arrogated by no earthly wisdom. One calm discovery of science may do away with all the boasted eternal necessities of the angry and the self-idolatrous. The pa.s.sions that may be necessary to savages are not bound to remain so to civilised men, any more than the eating of man's flesh or the wors.h.i.+p of Jugghernaut. When we think of the wonderful things lately done by science for the intercourse of the world, and the beautiful and tranquil books of philosophy written by men of equal energy and benevolence, and opening the peacefulest hopes for mankind, and views of creation to which Dante's universe was a nutsh.e.l.l,--such a vision as that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no better than the dream of an hypochondriacal savage, and his nutsh.e.l.l a rottenness to be spit out of the mouth.

Heaven send that the great poet's want of charity has not made myself presumptuous and uncharitable! But it is in the name of society I speak; and words, at all events, now-a-days are not the terrible, stake-preceding things they were in his. Readers in general, however--even those of the literary world--have little conception of the extent to which Dante carries either his cruelty or his abuse. The former (of which I shall give some examples presently) shews appalling habits of personal resentment; the latter is outrageous to a pitch of the ludicrous--positively screaming. I will give some specimens of it out of Foscolo himself, who collects them for a different purpose; though, with all his idolatry of Dante, he was far from being insensible to his mistakes.

"The people of Sienna," according to this national and Christian poet, were "a parcel of c.o.x-combs; those of Arezzo, dogs; and of Casentino, hogs. Lucca made a trade of perjury. Pistoia was a den of beasts, and ought to be reduced to ashes; and the river Arno should overflow and drown every soul in Pisa. Almost all the women in Florence walked half-naked in public, and were abandoned in private. Every brother, husband, son, and father, in Bologna, set their women to sale. In all Lombardy were not to be found three men who were not rascals; and in Genoa and Romagna people went about pretending to be men, but in reality were bodies inhabited by devils, their souls having gone to the 'lowest pit of h.e.l.l' to join the betrayers of their friends and kinsmen." [30]

So much for his beloved countrymen. As for foreigners, particularly kings, "Edward the First of England, and Robert of Scotland, were a couple of grasping fools; the Emperor Albert was an usurper; Alphonso the Second, of Spain, a debauchee; the King of Bohemia a coward; Frederick of Arragon a coward and miser; the Kings of Portugal and Norway forgers; the King of Naples a man whose virtues were expressed by a unit, and his vices by a million; and the King of France, the descendant of a Paris butcher, and of progenitors who poisoned St.

Thomas Aquinas, their descendants conquering with the arms of Judas rather than of soldiers, and selling the flesh of their daughters to old men, in order to extricate themselves from a danger." [31]

When we add to these invectives, d.a.m.nations of friends as well as foes, of companions, lawyers, men of letters, princes, philosophers, popes, pagans, innocent people as well as guilty, fools and wise, capable and incapable, men, women, and children,--it is really no better than a kind of diabolical sublimation of Lord Thurlow's anathemas in the _Rolliad_, which begins with

"d.a.m.nation seize ye all;"

and ends with

"d.a.m.n them beyond what mortal tongue can tell, Confound, sink, plunge them all to deepest blackest h.e.l.l." [32]

In the gross, indeed, this is ridiculous enough.

No burlesque can beat it. But in the particular, one is astonished and saddened at the cruelties in which the poet allows his imagination to riot horrors generally described with too intense a verisimilitude not to excite our admiration, with too astounding a perseverance not to amaze our humanity, and sometimes with an amount of positive joy and delight that makes us ready to shut the book with disgust and indignation. Thus, in a circle in h.e.l.l, where traitors are stuck up to their chins in ice (canto x.x.xii.), the visitor, in walking about, happens to give one of their faces a kick; the sufferer weeps, and then curses him--with such infernal truth does the writer combine the malignant with the pathetic! Dante replies to the curse by asking the man his name. He is refused it. He then seizes the miserable wretch by the hair, in order to force him to the disclosure; and Virgil is represented as commending the barbarity![33] But he does worse. To barbarity he adds treachery of his own. He tells another poor wretch, whose face is iced up with his tears, as if he had worn a crystal vizor, that if he will disclose his name and offence, he will relieve his eyes awhile, _that he may weep_. The man does so; and the ferocious poet then refuses to perform his promise, adding mockery to falsehood, and observing that ill manners are the only courtesy proper to wards such a fellow![34] It has been conjectured, that Macchiavelli apparently encouraged the enormities of the princes of his time, with a design to expose them to indignation. It might have been thought of Dante, if he had not taken a part in the cruelty, that he detailed the horrors of his h.e.l.l out of a wish to disgust the world with its frightful notions of G.o.d. This is certainly the effect of the worst part of his descriptions in an age like the present. Black burning gulfs, full of outcries and blasphemy, feet red-hot with fire, men eternally eating their fellow-creatures, frozen wretches malignantly das.h.i.+ng their iced heads against one another, other adversaries mutually exchanging shapes by force of an attraction at once irresistible and loathing, and spitting with hate and disgust when it is done--Enough, enough, for G.o.d's sake!

Take the disgust out of one's senses, O flower of true Christian wisdom and charity, now beginning to fill the air with fragrance!

But it will be said that Dante did all this out of his hate of cruelty itself, and of treachery itself. Partly no doubt he did; and entirely he thought he did. But see how the notions of such retribution react upon the judge, and produce in him the bad pa.s.sions he punishes. It is true the punishments are imaginary. Were a human being actually to see such things, he must be dehumanised or he would cry out against them with horror and detestation. But the poem draws them as truths; the writer's creed threatened them; he himself contributed to maintain the belief; and however we may suppose such a belief to have had its use in giving alarm to ruffian pa.s.sions and barbarously ignorant times, an age arrives when a beneficent Providence permits itself to be better understood, and dissipates the superfluous horror.

Many, indeed, of the absurdities of Dante's poem are too obvious now-a-days to need remark. Even the composition of the poem, egotistically said to be faultless by such critics as Alfieri, who thought they resembled him, partakes, as every body's style does, of the faults as well as good qualities of the man. It is nervous, concise, full almost as it can hold, picturesque, mighty, primeval; but it is often obscure, often harsh, and forced in its constructions, defective in melody, and wilful and superfluous in the rhyme. Sometimes, also, the writer is inconsistent in circ.u.mstance (probably from not having corrected the poem); and he is not above being filthy. Even in the episode of Paulo and Francesca, which has so often been p.r.o.nounced faultless, and which is unquestionably one of the most beautiful pieces of writing in the world, some of these faults are observable, particularly in the obscurity of the pa.s.sage about _tolta forma_, the cessation of the incessant tempest, and the non-adjuration of the two lovers in the manner that Virgil prescribes.

But truly it is said, that when Dante is great, n.o.body surpa.s.ses him. I doubt if anybody equals him, as to the constant intensity and incessant variety of his pictures; and whatever he paints, he throws, as it were, upon its own powers; as though an artist should draw figures that started into life, and proceeded to action for themselves, frightening their creator. Every motion, word, and look of these creatures becomes full of sensibility and suggestions. The invisible is at the back of the visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence describes a character, nay, forms the most striking part of a story; a word acts as a flash of lightning, which displays some gloomy neighbourhood, where a tower is standing, with dreadful faces at the window; or where, at your feet, full of eternal voices, one abyss is beheld dropping out of another in the lurid light of torment. In the present volume a story will be found which tells a long tragedy in half-a-dozen lines. Dante has the minute probabilities of a Defoe in the midst of the loftiest and most generalising poetry; and this feeling of matter-of-fact is impressed by fictions the most improbable, nay, the most ridiculous and revolting.

You laugh at the absurdity; you are shocked at the detestable cruelty; yet, for the moment, the thing almost seems as if it must be true. You feel as you do in a dream, and after it;--you wake and laugh, but the absurdity seemed true at the time; and while you laugh you shudder.

Enough of this crueller part of his genius has been exhibited; but it is seldom you can have the genius without sadness. In the circle of h.e.l.l, soothsayers walk along weeping, with their faces turned the wrong way, so that their tears fall between their shoulders. The picture is still more dreadful. Warton thinks it ridiculous. But I cannot help feeling with the poet, that it is dreadfully pathetic. It is the last mortifying insult to human pretension. Warton, who has a grudge against Dante natural to a man of happier piety, thinks him ridiculous also in describing the monster Geryon lying upon the edge of one of the gulfs of h.e.l.l "like a beaver" (canto xvii.). He is of opinion that the writer only does it to shew his knowledge of natural history. But surely the idea of so strange and awful a creature (a huge mild-faced man ending in a dragon's body) lying familiarly on the edge of the gulf, as a beaver does by the water, combines the supernatural with the familiar in a very impressive manner. It is this combination of extremes which is the life and soul of the whole poem; you have this world in the next; the same persons, pa.s.sions, remembrances, intensified by superhuman despairs or beat.i.tudes; the speechless entrancements of bliss, the purgatorial trials of hope and patience; the supports of hate and anger (such as they are) in h.e.l.l itself; nay, of loving despairs, and a self-pity made unboundedly pathetic by endless suffering. Hence there it no love-story so affecting as that of Paulo and Francesca thus told and perpetuated in another world; no father's misery so enforced upon us as Ugolino's, who, for hundreds of years, has not grown tired of the revenge to which it wrought him. Dante even puts this weight and continuity of feeling into pa.s.sages of mere transient emotion or ill.u.s.tration, unconnected with the next world; as in the famous instance of the verses about evening, and many others which the reader will meet with in this volume. Indeed, if pathos and the most impressive simplicity, and graceful beauty of all kinds, and abundant grandeur, can pay (as the reader, I believe, will think it does even in a prose abstract), for the pangs of moral discord and absurdity inflicted by the perusal of Dante's poem, it may challenge compet.i.tion with any in point of interest. His Heaven, it is true, though containing both sublime and lovely pa.s.sages, is not so good as his Earth. The more unearthly he tried to make it, the less heavenly it became. When he is content with earth in heaven itself,-when he literalises a metaphor, and with exquisite felicity finds himself _arrived there_ in consequence of fixing his eyes on the eyes of Beatrice, then he is most celestial. But his endeavours to express degrees of beat.i.tude and holiness by varieties of flame and light,--of dancing lights, revolving lights, lights of smiles, of stars, of starry crosses, of didactic letters and sentences, of animal figures made up of stars full of blessed souls, with saints _forming an eagle's beak_ and David in its _eye!_--such superhuman attempts become for the most part tricks of theatrical machinery, on which we gaze with little curiosity and no respect.

His angels, however, are another matter. Belief was prepared for those winged human forms, and they furnished him with some of his most beautiful combinations of the natural with the supernatural. Ginguene has remarked the singular variety as well as beauty of Dante's angels.

Milton's, indeed, are commonplace in the comparison. In the eighth canto of the _Inferno_, the devils insolently refuse the poet and his guide an entrance into the city of Dis:--an angel comes sweeping over the Stygian lake to enforce it; the noise of his wings makes the sh.o.r.es tremble, and is like a cras.h.i.+ng whirlwind such as beats down the trees and sends the peasants and their herds flying before it. The heavenly messenger, after rebuking the devils, touches the portals of the city with his wand; they fly open; and he returns the way he came without uttering a word to the two companions. His face was that of one occupied with other thoughts.

This angel is announced by a tempest. Another, who brings the souls of the departed to Purgatory, is first discovered at a distance, gradually disclosing white splendours, which are his wings and garments. He comes in a boat, of which his wings are the sails; and as he approaches, it is impossible to look him in the face for its brightness. Two other angels have green wings and green garments, and the drapery is kept in motion like a flag by the vehement action of the wings. A fifth has a face like the morning star, casting forth quivering beams. A sixth is of a l.u.s.tre so oppressive, that the poet feels a weight on his eyes before he knows what is coming. Another's presence affects the senses like the fragrance of a May-morning; and another is in garments dark as cinders, but has a sword in his hand too sparkling to be gazed at. Dante's occasional pictures of the beauties of external nature are worthy of these angelic creations, and to the last degree fresh and lovely. You long to bathe your eyes, smarting with the fumes of h.e.l.l, in his dews. You gaze enchanted on his green fields and his celestial blue skies, the more so from the pain and sorrow in midst of which the visions are created.

Dante's grandeur of every kind is proportionate to that of his angels, almost to his ferocity; and that is saying every thing. It is not always the spiritual grandeur of Milton, the subjection of the material impression to the moral; but it is equally such when he chooses, and far more abundant. His infernal precipices--his black whirlwinds--his innumerable cries and claspings of hands--his very odours of huge loathsomeness--his giants at twilight standing up to the middle in pits, like towers, and causing earthquakes when they move--his earthquake of the mountain in Purgatory, when a spirit is set free for heaven--his dignified Mantuan Sordello, silently regarding him and his guide as they go by, "like a lion on his watch"--his blasphemer, Capaneus, lying in unconquered rage and sullenness under an eternal rain of flakes of fire (human precursor of Milton's Satan)--his aspect of Paradise, "as if the universe had smiled"--his inhabitants of the whole planet Saturn crying out _so loud_, in accordance with the anti-papal indignation of Saint Pietro Damiano, that the poet, though among them, _could not hear what they said_--and the blus.h.i.+ng eclipse, like red clouds at sunset, which takes place at the apostle Peter's denunciation of the sanguinary filth of the court of Rome--all these sublimities, and many more, make us not know whether to be more astonished at the greatness of the poet or the raging littleness of the man. Grievous is it to be forced to bring two such opposites together; and I wish, for the honour and glory of poetry, I did not feel compelled to do so. But the swarthy Florentine had not the healthy temperament of his brethren, and he fell upon evil times.

Compared with Homer and Shakspeare, his very intensity seems only superior to theirs from an excess of the morbid; and he is inferior to both in other sovereign qualities of poetry--to the one, in giving you the healthiest general impression of nature itself--to Shakspeare, in boundless universality--to most great poets, in thorough harmony and delightfulness. He wanted (generally speaking) the music of a happy and a happy-making disposition. Homer, from his large vital bosom, breathes like a broad fresh air over the world, amidst alternate storm and suns.h.i.+ne, making you aware that there is rough work to be faced, but also activity and beauty to be enjoyed. The feeling of health and strength is predominant. Life laughs at death itself, or meets it with a n.o.ble confidence--is not taught to dread it as a malignant goblin.

Shakspeare has all the smiles as well as tears of nature, and discerns the "soul of goodness in things evil." He is comedy as well as tragedy--the entire man in all his qualities, moods, and experiences; and he beautifies all. And both those truly divine poets make nature their subject through her own inspiriting medium--not through the darkened gla.s.s of one man's spleen and resentment. Dante, in const.i.tuting himself the hero of his poem, not only renders her, in the general impression, as dreary as himself, in spite of the occasional beautiful pictures he draws of her, but narrows her very immensity into his pettiness. He fancied, alas, that he could build her universe over again out of the politics of old Rome and the divinity of the schools!

Dante, besides his great poem, and a few Latin eclogues of no great value, wrote lyrics full of Platonical sentiment, some of which antic.i.p.ated the loveliest of Petrarch's; and he was the author of various prose works, political and philosophical, all more or less masterly for the time in which he lived, and all coadjutors of his poetry in fixing his native tongue. His account of his Early Life (the _Vita Nuova_) is a most engaging history of a boyish pa.s.sion, evidently as real and true on his own side as love and truth can be, whatever might be its mistake as to its object. The treatise on the Vernacular Tongue (_de Vulgari Eloquio_) shews how critically he considered his materials for impressing the world, and what a reader he was of every production of his contemporaries. The Banquet (_Convito_) is but an abstruse commentary on some of his minor poems; but the book on Monarchy (_de Monarchia_) is a compound of ability and absurdity, in which his great genius is fairly overborne by the barbarous pedantry of the age.

It is an argument to prove that the world must all be governed by one man; that this one man must be the successor of the Roman Emperor--G.o.d having manifestly designed the world to be subject for ever to the Roman empire; and lastly, that this Emperor is equally designed by G.o.d to be independent of the Pope--spiritually subject to him, indeed, but so far only as a good son is subject to the religious advice of his father; and thus making Church and State happy for ever in the two divided supremacies. And all this a.s.sumption of the obsolete and impossible the author gravely proves in all the forms of logic, by arguments drawn from the history of aeneas, and the providential cackle of the Roman geese!

How can the patriots of modern Italy, justified as they are in extolling the poet to the skies, see him plunge into such depths of bigotry in his verse and childishness in his prose, and consent to perplex the friends of advancement with making a type of their success out of so erring though so great a man? Such slavishness, even to such greatness, is a poor and unpromising thing, compared with an altogether unprejudiced and forward-looking self-reliance. To have no faith in names has been announced as one of their principles; and "G.o.d and Humanity" is their motto. What, therefore, has Dante's name to do with their principles? or what have the semi-barbarisms of the thirteenth century to do with the final triumph of "G.o.d and Humanity?" Dante's lauded wish for that union of the Italian States, which his fame has led them so fondly to identify with their own, was but a portion of his greater and prouder wish to see the whole world at the feet of his boasted ancestress, Rome. Not, of course, that he had no view to what he considered good and just government (for what sane despot purposes to rule without that?); but his good and just government was always to be founded on the _sine qua non_ principle of universal Italian domination.[35]

All that Dante said or did has its interest for us in spite of his errors, because he was an earnest and suffering man and a great genius; but his fame must ever continue to lie where his greatest blame does, in his princ.i.p.al work. He was a gratuitous logician, a preposterous politician, a cruel theologian; but his wonderful imagination, and (considering the bitterness that was in him) still more wonderful sweetness, have gone into the hearts of his fellow-creatures, and will remain there in spite of the moral and religious absurdities with which they are mingled, and of the inability which the best-natured readers feel to a.s.sociate his entire memory, as a poet, with their usual personal delight in a poet and his name.

[Footnote 1: As notices of Dante's life have often been little but repet.i.tions of former ones, I think it due to the painstaking character of this volume to state, that besides consulting various commentators and critics, from Boccaccio to Fraticelli and others, I have diligently perused the _Vita di Dante_, by Cesare Balbo, with Rocco's annotations; the _Histoire Litteraire d'Italie,_ by Ginguene; the _Discorso sul Testo della Commedia_, by Foscolo; the _Amori e Rime di Dante_ of Arrivabene; the _Veltro Allegorico di Dante_, by Troja; and Ozanam's _Dante et la Philosophie Catholique an Treixieme Siecle._]

[Footnote 2: Canto xv. 88.]

[Footnote 3: For the doubt apparently implied respecting the district, see canto xvi. 43, or the summary of it in the present volume. The following is the pa.s.sage alluded to in the philosophical treatise "Risponder si vorrebbe, non colle parole, ma col coltello, a tanta b.e.s.t.i.a.lita." _Convito,--Opere Minori_, 12mo, Fir. 1834, vol. II. p. 432.

"Beautiful mode" (says Perticeri in a note) "of settling questions."]

[Footnote 4: _Istorie Fiorentine, II_. 43 (in _Tutte le Opere_, 4to, 1550).]

[Footnote 5: The name has been varied into _Allagheri_, _Aligieri_, _Alleghieri_, _Alligheri_, _Aligeri_, with the accent generally on the third, but sometimes on the second syllable. See Foscolo, _Discorso sul Testo, p_. 432. He says, that in Verona, where descendants of the poet survive, they call it _Algeri_. But names, like other words, often wander so far from their source, that it is impossible to ascertain it.

Who would suppose that _Pomfret_ came from _Pontefract_, or _wig_ from _parrucca_? Coats of arms, unless in very special instances, prove nothing but the whims of the heralds.

Those who like to hear of anything in connexion with Dante or his name, may find something to stir their fancies in the following grim significations of the word in the dictionaries:

"_Dante_, a kind of great wild beast in Africa, that hath a very hard skin."--_Florio's Dictionary_, edited by Torreggiano.

"_Dante_, an animal called otherwise the Great Beast."--_Vocabolario della Crusca, Compendiato_, Ven. 1729.]

[Footnote 6: See the pa.s.sage in "h.e.l.l," where Virgil, to express his enthusiastic approbation of the scorn and cruelty which Dante chews to one of the condemned, embraces and kisses him for a right "disdainful soul," and blesses the "mother that bore him."]

[Footnote 7: _Opere minori_, vol iii 12. Flor. 1839, pp. 292 &c.]

[Footnote 8: "Beatrix quitta la terre dans tout l'eclat de la jeunesse et de la virginite." See the work as above ent.i.tled, Paris, 1840, p. 60.

The words in Latin, as quoted from the will by the critic alluded to in the _Foreign Quarterly Review_ (No._ 65, art. _Dante Allighieri_), are, "Bici filiae suae et uxori D. (Domini) Simonis de Bardis." "Bici" is the Latin dative case of Bice, the abbreviation of Beatrice. This employment, by the way, of an abbreviated name in a will, may seem to go counter to the deductions respecting the name of Dante. And it may really do so. Yet a will is not an epitaph, nor the address of a beatified spirit; neither is equal familiarity perhaps implied, as a matter of course, in the abbreviated names of male and female.]

[Footnote 9: _Vita Nuova_. ut sup. p. 343]

[Footnote 10: _Vita Nuova_, p. 345.]

[Footnote 11: In the article on _Dante, in_ the _Foreign Quarterly Review_, (ut supra), the exordium of which made me hope that the eloquent and a.s.sumption-denouncing writer was going to supply a good final account of his author, equally satisfactory for its feeling and its facts, but which ended in little better than the customary gratuitousness of wholesale panegyric, I was surprised to find the union with Gemma Donati characterised as "calm and cold,--rather the accomplishment of a social duty than the result of an irresistible impulse of the heart," p. 15. The accomplishment of the "social duty" is an a.s.sumption, not very probable with regard to any body, and much less so in a fiery Italian of twenty-six; but the addition of the epithets, "calm and cold," gives it a sort of horror. A reader of this article, evidently the production of a man of ability but of great wilfulness, is tempted to express the disappointment it has given him in plainer terms than might be wished, in consequence of the extraordinary license which its writer does not scruple to allow to his own fancies, in expressing his opinion of what he is pleased to think the fancies of others.]

[Footnote 12: "Le invettive contr' essa per tanti secoli originarono dalla enumerazione rettorica del Boccaccio di tutti gli inconvenienti del matrimonio, e dove per altro ei dichiara,--'Certo io non affermo queste cose a Dante essere avvenute, che non lo so; comeche vero sia, che o a simili cose a queste, o ad altro che ne fusse cagione, egli una volta da lei part.i.tosi, che per consolazione de' suoi affanni gli era stata data, mai ne dove ella fusse volle venire, ne sofferse che dove egli fusse ella venisse giammai, con tutto che di piu figliuoli egli insieme con lei fusse parente." _Discorso sul Testo_, ut sup. Londra, Pickering, 1825, p. 184.]

[Footnote 13: Foscolo, in the _Edinburgh review_, vol. x.x.x. p. 351. ]

[Footnote 14: "Ahi piaciuto fosse al Dispensatore dell'universo, che la cagione della mia scusa mai non fosse stata; che ne altri contro a me avria fallato, ne io sofferto avrei pena ingiustamente; pena, dico, d'esilio e di poverta. Poiche fu piacere de' cittadini della bellissima e famosissima figlia di Roma, Florenza, di gettarmi fuori del suo dolcissimo seno (nel quale nato e nudrito fui sino al colmo della mia vita, e nel quale, con buona pace di quella, desidero con tutto il core di riposare l'animo stanco, e terminare il tempo che m'e dato); per le parti quasi tutte, alle quali questa lingua si stende, peregrino, quasi mendicando, sono andato, mostrando contro a mia voglia la piaga della fortuna, che suole ingiustamente al piagato molte volte essere imputata.

Veramente io sono stato legno sanza vela e sanza governo, portato a diversi porti e foci e liti dal vento secco che vapora la dolorosa poverta; e sono vile apparito agli occhi a molti, che forse per alcuna fama in altra forma mi aveano immaginato; nel cospetto de' quali non solamente mia persona invili, ma di minor pregio si fece ogni opera, si gia fatta, come quella che fosse a fare."-_Opere Minori_, ut sup. vol.

ii. p. 20.]

[Footnote 15: "In licteris vestris et reverentia debita et affectione receptis, quam repatriatio mea cure sit vobis ex animo grata mente ac diligenti animaversione concepi, etenim tanto me districtius obligastis, quanto rarius exules invenire amicos contingit. ad illam vero significata respondeo: et si non eatenus qualiter forsam pusillanimitas appeteret aliquorum, ut sub examine vestri consilii ante judicium, affectuose deposco. ecce igitur quod per licteras vestri mei: que nepotis, necnon aliorum quamplurium amicorum significatum est mihi. per ordinamentum nuper factum Florentie super absolutione bannitorum. quod si solvere vellem certam pecunie quant.i.tatem, vellemque pati notam oblationis et absolvi possem et redire ut presens. in quo quidem duo ridenda et male perconciliata sunt. Pater, dico male perconciliata per illos qui tali expresserunt: nam vestre litere discretius et consultius clausulate nicil de talibus continebant. estne ista revocatio gloriosa qua d. all. (i. e. _Dantes Alligherius_) revocatur ad patriam per tril.u.s.trium fere perpessus exilium? becne meruit conscientia manifesta quibuslibet? hec sudor et labor continuatus in studiis? absit a viro philosophie domestica temeraria terreni cordis humilitas, ut more cujusdam cioli et aliorum infamiam quasi vinctus ipse se patiatur offerri. absit a viro predicante just.i.tiam, ut perpessus injuriam inferentibus. velud benemerentibus, pecuniam suam solvat. non est hec via redeundi ad patriam, Pater mi, sed si alia per vos, aut deinde per alios invenietur que fame d. _(Dantis)_ que onori non deroget, illam non lentis pa.s.sibus acceptabo. quod si per nullam talem Florentia introitur, nunquam Florentiam introibo. quidni? nonne solis astrorumque specula ubique conspiciam? nonne dulcissimas veritates potero speculari ubique sub celo, ni prius inglorium, imo ignominiosum populo, Florentineque civitati am reddam? quippe panis non deficiet."]

[Footnote 16: _Opere minori_, ut sup. vol iii. p. 186.]

[Footnote 17: _Veltro Allegorico di Dante_, ut sup. p. 208, where the Appendix contains the Latin original.]

[Footnote 18: See Fraticelli's Dissertation on the Convito, in _Opere Minori_, ut sup. vol. ii. p. 560.]