virtually become dominant in the state. They were inscribed as members in the different Arts or Companies,-they recovered, in short, their political rights: in so doing there is no reason to believe that they contemplated any dereliction of principles; but their withdrawal from the Guelf Club would naturally be tortured for factious purposes into a secession from the original principles of the party, and the charge might derive additional colour from an event which afterwards occurred. It is a disastrous circumstance for a state, whenever private animosities are capable of being converted into public quarrels,-a calamity of which the history of Florence presents us with repeated instances. From a family feud sprung the fatal political faction of the Bianchi and the Neri. With the former Vieri de' Cerchi and Dante were so imprudent as to allow themselves to be confounded. Many of the old Ghibellins had also attached themselves to the Bianchi in the desperate hope of recovering their influence or their property. The moderate party therefore, headed by Vieri and Dante, had seceded from the Guelf Club, and had associated themselves with some of the old Ghibellin party; but at that period they probably neither did, nor intended to, depart from the broad scheme of policy which had directed their movements in the former part of their career.

Such being the state of parties in Florence, the strength being distributed equally, or nearly so, in different hands, and the government being too weak to make itself respected, or to preserve the peace of the city, the contending factions directed their attention to Rome, and addressed themselves to the individual who then occupied the Papal chair, as to a common mediator. It turned out that Corso Donati had most weight in that quarter. It was part of his scheme to summon foreign aid with the view of gaining a decided preponderance. He and his friends turned their eyes upon Charles of Valois, brother of the French King. Dante, it was known, was strongly opposed to his reception into the city. He suspected, it is probable, the intrigues of Corso or the fatal tendency of such a measure. The Poet, who had previously filled with great honour to himself the office of Prior, was absent on an embassy to Rome, when the French party having prevailed in the Florentine councils, Charles was called in, Dante banished, and his political associates subjected to the most oppressive and unjust treatment. It is to the avowed policy of the Poet towards the French Prince, that, according to a general and very credible tradition, we must refer his expatriation and consequent misfortunes; and the name of her greatest modern Poet has thus been added to the long list of exiles for which Italy has been celebrated. It includes the name of a

family, originally of little note, but which has in our own days indissolubly associated itself with the annals of Europe. The Buonaparti were exiled from Florence early in the 14th century, as Ghibellins. They removed to the district called the Lunigiana, whence they are said afterwards to have passed to Corsica.*

It was not, apparently, until long after his banishment that Dante evinced any decided disposition to advocate the cause of Ghibellinism, which asserted the paramount rights of the Empire. The "History of the Guelfs and Ghibellins," attributed to his pen, and seen by Leonardo Aretin, has either perished or sleeps in the dusty chests of some illiterate convent. But that his opinions were never of an ultra class is sufficiently proved by his early career, and by the remarkable fact that he found his last earthly refuge at the court of a Guelf Prince, Guido da Polenta. Pagano della Torre, his previous protector, was also of Guelf principles. It may be that he sought through their influence to have his sentence repealed; and we find him, a year before his death, clinging to the hope of returning to his country. Giovanni del Virgilio wished him to go to Bologna and receive the poetic crown there: his reply is as follows:-

"Nonne triumphales melius pexare capillos

Et patrio, redeam si quando, abscondere canos
Fronde sub inserta solitum flavescere, Sarno ?" +

Dante was not the only great Florentine who sought refuge from the factions and divisions of a democracy in a monarchical form of government,-such would seem to have been the sentiments of Macchiavelli, forced upon him by the course of events in his own times. Dante sought to reconcile the factions, and give tranquillity to his country, which had been harassed by the dissensions of the previous hundred years.§ Finding the object unattainable without foreign aid, and that his enemies were intriguing with France, he applied first to the Pope, and finally to the Emperor Henry VII., who appears, until thwarted by the animosity of the contending parties, to have adopted a similar line of policy, that of conciliation. But the endeavours of the

* Gerini, Memorie Storiche di Lunigiana.

† Ecl. I. Dante, Opere Minori, tom. I. part II. p. 289. Firenze. 1835-40. See the concluding chapter of the Prince, and his familiar correspondence with Guicciardini; see also Petrarch's sentiments, Epistola ad Carolum, 4.

§ Dante dunque voleva unità di spada e di forza in Italia, e chi non ancora così pensa dopo cinque secoli di terribilissimo esperimento scagli contro di lui il primo sasso."-Antologia, Febbr. 1832, page 94.

At the time of Henry's entry into Pisa, he found the last descendant of the famous Guelf Count, Ugolino della Gherardesca, still in captivity: he immediately set him free. On taking this step, he, however, questioned the rulers of the city,

Poet were doomed to be crossed; and in his philosophical work, "Il Convito," we find him exclaiming, "O wretched, wretched country, how irresistibly I am impelled to commiserate thy condition, whenever I read or write anything pertaining to civil government.*

Dante's great poem is indispensable to all who investigate the manners, political events, theological opinions, antiquities or philology of the middle ages. But his other works are interesting, as exhibiting, although in an inferior degree, the same extraordinary power of expressing the sternest as well as the tenderest emotions, to which his impassioned temperament disposed him. In him appears realized the imagination of a writer of our own day

"The Poet in a golden clime was born,

Dower'd with the hate of hate, the love of love, the scorn of scorn." The haughtiness of Dantet almost passed into a proverb. The expression attributed to him, when, at a difficult crisis of public affairs, it was proposed that he should fill an important embassy, proves at least the general notion of his character. "If I go," said he, "who remains? and if I remain, who goes?" Another trait is given by the author of the Veltro Allegorico, who does not, however, cite any authority. Dante was leaning against an altar in the church of Santa Maria Novella, buried in profound meditation, when he was interrupted by an idler, who would persist in annoying him with questions. At last Dante broke silence. "Before I answer you, tell me this-Which do you consider to be the greatest beast in the world?" The other replied, that according to Pliny, this could only be the elephant. "True, O Elephant, pester me no more," said Dante, and immediately departed. Another incident to the same effect is to be found in the novels of Sacchetti. He could not disguise his own consciousness of his pre-eminent ability. One of his celebrated letters to the Emperor he commences thus:-"I, Dante Alighieri and the Florentine exiles." Such conduct must soon have destroyed his popularity with his party: he admits in one of his epistles, that he had been guilty of imprudence; and it may be doubted whether, as an exile, he was not driven into Ghibellinism, by

whether they had any opposition to make: they replied, that they had incarcerated the unfortunate Guelf, for no crime of his own, but for the offences of his ancestors. See Sclopis Storia della Legislazione Italiana, tom. I. p. 245, citing Doenniges Acta Henrici VII. p. 54.

Tratt. IV. c. 28.

+ The poet was conscious of his failing; thus he describes himself, whilst in the first circle of the Purgatory, as undergoing the punishment there inflicted upon pride, Purg. XI. 73-78.

having been virtually abandoned by his political friends.* When, after fruitless attempts to obtain a recal by forcible means or negociation, he became convinced that he could only hope to effect that object by submitting to ignominious terms-then, in the indignation of his spirit, he penned the words, “Nunquam Florentiam introibo." Then it was, to use an expression of Foscolo, that it was no longer Florence that banished Dante, but the latter who pronounced the sentence of exile against that city. His haughty demeanour in earlier life was less excusable than at a later period, when, in the language of Johnson, the insolence and resentment of which he was accused, were not easily to be avoided by one irritated by perpetual hardships, and constrained hourly to return the spurns of contempt, and repress the insolence of prosperity. And yet, in a composition of probably an earlier date, we find him continually descanting upon the praises of courtesy, and those other amiable qualities, which may reasonably be regarded as having qualified the harsher features of his character. According to him,§ the peculiar characteristic of the noble, that is, the gentleman, is elective habit, "abito eligente," which ever makes choice of the mean between two extremes. How has the passage escaped the notice of the author of the Broad Stone of Honour? He proceeds

"The soul that this celestial grace adorns,

In secret hides it not,

But soon as to its earthly mate espoused,
Displays it, until death:

Gentle, obedient, alive to shame,

In early age is seen;

Careful the frame in beauty to improve,

And all accomplishments.

Temperate and bold, in youthful years, and full

Of love and courtesy, and thirst of fame,

Placing in loyalty its sole delight;

Then in old age wins praise

For prudence, justice, liberality;
And in itself enjoys

*Conf. Parad. XVII. 61-6.

This thought, however, is one of classical antiquity, has been attributed to Diogenes, and appropriated by Shakspere

"All places that the eye of heaven visits,

Are to a wise man ports and happy havens :
Teach thy necessity to reason thus ;

There is no virtue like necessity :

Think not, the King did banish thee,
But thou the King."

See the Veltro Allegorico, p. 188.

§ Convito, Trattato Quarto.

Richard II. Act I. Sc. 3.

To hear and talk of others' valorous deeds.*
Last in the fourth and closing scene of life,
To God is re-espoused,

Contemplating the end which is at hand,
And thanks returning for departed years,
Reflect now how the many are deceived."+

66

With respect to the minor poems of Dante, Mr. Bruce Whyte has dismissed them with the assertion that they sentent la lampe;" but surely the easy flow of many of those canzoni, and of Mr. Whyte's own translation, might have saved the lyrical compositions of the greatest poet of the middle ages from such sweeping condemnation.

His early fame is discernible by the terms of intimacy on which he stood with the most eminent men of his day in Florence. The ordinances of justice, in excluding all families from the government which had been illustrated by knighthood,‡-a circumstance at that time treated as conclusive evidence of nobility,-virtually deprived Dante of his civic rights with others he adopted the then approved method of evading the injustice of the law by passing over into the popular order; and with this view entered himself, as already mentioned, in one of the greater arts-that of the Physicians. His matriculation, about the year 1297, runs thus:-"Matricolato Dante d'Aldighiero degli Aldighieri Poeta Fiorentino."§ So that we find him, at that early date, with a poetical reputation already established,|| although undoubtedly it was not until later in life that he gave the earnest of the extraordinary genius which entitles him to rank with those "royal" few,

"whose fame

Like heav'n above their living head was bent."

It is an unfortunate mode of studying the works of Dante, to

* This is a generous but not a faithful translation of the line,

"D' udire e ragionar dell' altrui prode." + Dante's Canzoniere, translation of Mr. Lyell, p. 117.

Notwithstanding this explanation of the term "Grandi," which Dino Com. pagni, a contemporary historian, has furnished, (Cronica delle Cose occorrenti ne' Tempi suoi,) Mr. Hallam has, in his work on the Middle Ages, (vol. I. p. 309, note,) mistaken the consequence for the cause, and supposed that they were called "Grandi" because their names were inscribed on the ordinances of justice; it is true this may have become the secondary meaning of the term. Niebuhr has noticed the analogy of this voluntary resignation of nobility to the Transitio ad plebem of the Romans.

§ Pelli, p. 90.

We find him, indeed, in the very first canto of the "Inferno," which is generally understood to have been written before his exile, using the past tense in speaking of his fame. He professes his obligation to Virgil for "Lo bello stile che m' ha fatto onore."-Infern. I.