Among My Books Volume Ii Part 5

[24] Thus Foscolo. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that at first the blacks were the extreme Guelphs, and the whites those moderate Guelphs inclined to make terms with the Ghibellines. The matter is obscure, and Balbo contradicts himself about it.

[25] Secolo di Dante, p. 654. He would seem to have been in Rome during the Jubilee of 1300. See Inferno, XVIII. 28-33.

[26] That Dante was not of the _grandi_, or great n.o.bles (what we call grandees), as some of his biographers have tried to make out, is plain from this sentence, where his name appears low on the list and with no ornamental prefix, after half a dozen _domini_. Bayle, however, is equally wrong in supposing his family to have been obscure.

[27] See Witte, "Quando e da chi sia composto l' Ottimo Comento,"

etc. (Leipsic, 1847)

[28] Ott. Com. Parad. XVII.

[29] The loose way in which many Italian scholars write history is as amazing as it is perplexing. For example: Count Balbo's "Life of Dante" was published originally at Turin, in 1839. In a note (Lib. I.

Cap. X.) he expresses a doubt whether the date of Dante's banishment should not be 1303, and inclines to think it should be. Meanwhile, it seems never to have occurred to him to employ some one to look at the original decree, still existing in the archives. Stranger still, Le Monnier, reprinting the work at Florence in 1853, within a stone's throw of the doc.u.ment itself, and with full permission from Balbo to make corrections, leaves the matter just where it was.

[30] Convito, Tratt. I. Cap. III.

[31] Macchiavelli is the authority for this, and is carelessly cited in the preface to the Udine edition of the "Codex Bartolinia.n.u.s" as placing it in 1312. Macchiavelli does no such thing, but expressly implies an earlier date, perhaps 1310. (See Macch. Op. ed. Baretti, London, 1772, Vol. I. p. 60.)

[32] See Carlyle's "Frederic," Vol. I. p. 147.

[33] A mistake, for Guido did not become lord of Ravenna till several years later. But Boccaccio also a.s.signs 1313 as the date of Dante's withdrawal to that city, and his first protector may have been one of the other Polentani to whom Guido (surnamed Novello, or the Younger; his grandfather having borne the same name) succeeded.

[34] Under this date (1315) a 4th _condemnatio_ against Dante is mentioned _facta in anno 1315 de mense Octobris per D. Rainerium, D.

Zachario de Urbeveteri, olim et tunc vicarium regium civitatis Florentia_, etc. It is found recited in the decree under which in 1342 Jacopo di Dante redeemed a portion of his father's property, to wit: _Una possessione c.u.m vinea et c.u.m domibus super ea, combustis et non combustis, posita in populo S. Miniatis de Pagnlao_. In the _domibus combustis_ we see the blackened traces of Dante's kinsman by marriage, Corso Donati, who plundered and burnt the houses of the exiled Bianchi, during the occupation of the city by Charles of Valois. (See "De Romanis," notes on Tiraboschi's Life of Dante, in the Florence ed. of 1830, Vol. V. p. 119.)

[35] Voltaire's blunder has been made part of a serious theory by Mons. E. Aroux, who gravely a.s.sures us that, during the Middle Ages, Tartar was only a cryptonym by which heretics knew each other, and adds: _Il n'y a donc pas trop a s'etonner des noms bizarres de Mastino et de Cane donnes a ces Della Scala_. (Dante, heretique, revolutionnaire, et socialiste, Paris, 1854, pp. 118-120.)

[36] If no monument at all was built by Guido, as is a.s.serted by Balbo (Vita, I. Lib. II. Cap. XVII.), whom De Vericour copies without question, we are at a loss to account for the preservation of the original epitaph replaced by Cardinal Bembo when he built the new tomb, in 1483. Bembo's own inscription implies an already existing monument, and, if in disparaging terms, yet epitaphial Latin verses are not to be taken too literally, considering the exigencies of that branch of literary ingenuity. The doggerel Latin has been thought by some unworthy of Dante, as Shakespeare's doggerel English epitaph has been thought unworthy of him. In both cases the rudeness of the verses seems to us a proof of authenticity. An enlightened posterity with unlimited superlatives at command, and in an age when stone-cutting was cheap, would have aimed at something more befitting the occasion. It is certain, at least in Dante's case, that Cardinal Bembo would never have inserted in the very first words an allusion to the De Monarchia, a book long before condemned as heretical.

[37] We have translated _lacusque_ by "the Pit," as being the nearest English correlative. Dante probably meant by it the several circles of his h.e.l.l, narrowing, one beneath the other, to the centre. As a curious specimen of English we subjoin Professor de Vericour's translation: "I have sang the rights of monarchy; I have sang, in exploring them, the abode of G.o.d, the Phlegethon and the impure lakes, as long as destinies have permitted. But as the part of myself, which was only pa.s.sing, returns to better fields, and happier, returned to his Maker, I, Dante, exiled from the regions of fatherland, I am laid here, I, to whom Florence gave birth, a mother who experienced but a feeble love." (The Life and Times of Dante, London, 1858, p. 208.)

[38] Inferno, X. 85.

[39] Paradiso, XVII.

[40] He says after the return of Louis of Bavaria to Germany, which took place in that year. The De Monarchia was afterward condemned by the Council of Trent.

[41] Paradiso, XXVII.

[42] Inferno, XI.

[43] See the letter in Gaye, Carteggio inedito d' artisti, Vol. I. p.

123.

[44] St. Rene Taillandier, in Revue des Deux Mondes, December 1, 1856.

[45] Dante, Vol. IV. p. 116.

[46] Ste. Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, Tome XI. p. 169.

[47] Dict. Phil., art. _Dante_.

[48] Corresp. gen., Oeuvres, Tome LVII. pp. 80, 81.

[49] Essai sur les moeurs, Oeuvres, Tome XVII. pp. 371, 372.

[50] Genie du Christianisme, Cap. IV.

[51] Ed. Lond. 1684, p. 199.

[52] It is worth notice, as a proof of Chaucer's critical judgment, that he calls Dante "the great poet of Itaille," while in the "Clerke's Tale" he speaks of Petrarch as a "worthy clerk," as "the laureat poete" (alluding to the somewhat sentimental ceremony at Rome), and says that his

"Rhetorike sweete Enlumined all Itaille of poetry."

[53] It is possible that Sackville may have read the Inferno, and it is certain that Sir John Harrington had. See the preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso.

[54] Second edition, 1800.

[55] Dante Alighieri's lyrische Gedichte, Leipzig, 1842, Theil II.

pp. 4-9.