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riously stated, as a counterpart to the notoriety of its untruth. It
must be acknowledged that Dante himself gave the cue to it by
more than silence; for he not only vaunts her acquaintance in
the next world, but assumes that she returns his love in that re-
gion, as if no such person as her husband could have existed, or
as if he himself had not been married also. This life-long per-
tinacity of will is illustrative of his whole career.

Meantime, though the young poet's father had died, nothing
was wanting on the part of his guardians, or perhaps his mother,
to furnish him with an excellent education. It was so complete,
as to enable him to become master of all the knowledge of his
time; and he added to this learning more than a taste for draw-
ing and music. He speaks of himself as drawing an angel in
his tablets on the first anniversary of Beatrice's death.* One of
his instructors was Brunetto Latini, the most famous scholar then
living; and he studied both at the universities of Padua and Bo-
logna. At eighteen, perhaps sooner, he had shewn such a genius
for poetry as to attract the friendship of Guido Cavalcante, a
young noble of a philosophical as well as poetical turn of mind,
who has retained a reputation with posterity: and it was probably
at the same time he became acquainted with Giotto, who drew
his likeness, and with Casella, the musician, whom he greets with
so much tenderness in the other world.

Nor were his duties as a citizen forgotten. The year before
Beatrice's death, he was at the battle of Campaldino, which his
countrymen gained against the people of Arezzo; and the year
after it he was present at the taking of Caprona from the Pisans.
It has been supposed that he once studied medicine with a view
to it as a profession; but the conjecture probably originated in
nothing more than his having entered himself of one of the city-
companies (which happened to be the medical) for the purpose of
DANTE:

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.

* Vita Nuova, ut sup. p. 343.

Critical Notice of his Life

Grmins.

CRITICAL NOTICE

OF

DANTE'S LIFE AND GENIUS.*

DANTE was a very great poet, a man of the strongest passions, a claimant of unbounded powers to lead and enlighten the world; and he lived in a semi-barbarous age, as favourable to the intensity of his imagination, as it was otherwise to the rest of his pretensions. Party zeal, and the fluctuations of moral and critical opinion, have at different periods over-rated and depreciated his memory; and if, in the following attempt to form its just estimate, I have found myself compelled, in some important respects, to differ with preceding writers, and to protest in particular against his being regarded as a proper teacher on any one point, poetry excepted, and as far as all such genius and energy cannot in some degree help being, I have not been the less sensible of the wonderful nature of that genius, while acting within the circle to which it belongs. Dante was indeed so great a poet, and at the same time exhibited in his personal character such a mortifying exception to what we conceive to be the natural wisdom and temper of great poets; in other words, he was such a bigoted and exasperated man, and sullied his imagination with so much that

• As notices of Dante's life have often been little but repetitions 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 Littéraire d'Italie, by Ginguéné; 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 au Treizième Siècle.

could, and bring up the children. All that is known is, that she never lived with him more.

Dante now certainly did what his enemies had accused him of wishing to do: he joined the old exiles whom he had helped to make such, the party of the Ghibellines. He alleges, that he never was really of any party but his own; a naïve confession, probably true in one sense, considering his scorn of other people, his great intellectual superiority, and the large views he had for the whole Italian people. And, indeed, he soon quarrelled in private with the individuals composing his new party, however staunch he apparently remained to their cause. His former associates he had learnt to hate for their differences with him and for their self-seeking; he hated the Pope for deceiving him; he hated the Pope's French allies for being his allies, and interfering with Florence; and he had come to love the Emperor for being hated by them all, and for holding out (as he fancied) the only chance of reuniting Italy to their confusion, and making her the restorer of himself, and the mistress of the world.

With these feelings in his heart, no money in his purse, and no place in which to lay his head, except such as chance-patrons afforded him, he now began to wander over Italy, like some lonely lion of a man, "grudging in his great disdain." At one moment he was conspiring and hoping; at another, despairing and endeavouring to conciliate his beautiful Florence: now again catching hope from some new movement of the Emperor's; and then, not very handsomely threatening and re-abusing her; but always pondering and grieving, or trying to appease his thoughts with some composition, chiefly of his great work. It is conjectured, that whenever anything particularly affected him, whether with joy or sorrow, he put it, hot with the impression, into his "sacred poem." Every body who jarred against his sense of right or his prejudices he sent to the infernal regions, friend or foe: the strangest people who sided with them (but certainly no personal foe) he exalted to heaven. He encouraged, if not personally assisted, two ineffectual attempts of the Ghibellines against Florence; wrote, besides his great work, a book of mixed prose and poetry on "Love and Virtue" (the Convito, or Banquet); a Latin treatise on Monarchy (de Monarchia), recommending the

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