might see this youngest of the angels, wherefore I in my boyhood found her so noble and praiseworthy that certainly of her might have been said those words of the poet Homer, 'She seemed not to be the daughter of a mortal man but of a god.'" One day when he was eighteen years of age he stood upon the Ponte Vecchio, the Old Bridge of Florence, and it chanced that Beatrice passed this way, walking between two ladies. As he gazed at her with all his soul in his eyes, she looked towards him, and their eyes met. Young Dante stood transfixed, his heart throbbing with an excess of feeling, while Beatrice gave him a gentle salutation and passed on. It was the turning point in the lover's life, for it made him a poet. Going home, he fell asleep while thinking of his lady's courtesy, and in his sleep dreamed wondrous things of her. This vision Dante, when he awoke, wrote down in the form of a sonnet, and this sonnet was the first of a series of love-poems which he wrote and published.

I cannot tell here the story of Dante and Beatrice, but it is to be read as it came palpitating from the heart of Dante himself as set down in his Vita Nuova, beautifully translated into our own tongue by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Few men have loved as Dante loved, and none have written of their love so tenderly, so passionately, so purely. Those whom the gods love die young, and Beatrice was taken from the world in her twenty-fourth year, leaving Dante broken-hearted. But Beatrice was his dream-love always, and although he married and had children, and lived a tumultuous life in the midst of the fiercest political strife, in the secret shrine of his heart was the image of that fairest among women, and she it was who inspired him to write his Divine Comedy, in which, as he said, he wrote "concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman."

Meanwhile Dante had gained for himself high rank among the young intellectuals of Florence. There was at that time in the city on the Arno a little band of poets, young men of noble families, who were the creators of that "dolce stil nuovo," of that sweet new style, the sonnet, and Dante by his exquisite love poems was looked up to as their model and their master. They addressed many of their sonnets to him, and he answered in the same medium of melodious verse. Love was their theme, and the praise of those fair women who were the fame of Florence. Yet these young poets did other work than write "sonnets to their mistress's eyebrows." There was fighting to be done, and young blood often stained the stones of Florence red.

of Fierce Hearts.

bloodiest

pages

It was a turbulent time. The annals of the The Home Florence of Dante's days show some of the of medieval history. Florence was a prey to faction. There were blood-feuds between family and family, and one deed of vengeance led to another of reprisal, and alternately, without end. It began with the murder of Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti. This young gallant-“ a right winsome and comely knight," the historian calls him—had been forced into a betrothal with a lady of the Amidei family, but at the eleventh hour he deserted her and married a beautiful girl of the Donati. The Amidei regarded this as a deadly insult, and one day, at the foot of the statue of Mars on the Ponte Vecchio, where afterwards Dante met Beatrice and received her salutation, young Buondelmonti was stabbed to death by the daggers of the Amidei and their kinsmen. It was the beginning of long years of bloodshed. The family of the murdered man and of his bride vowed vengeance, and the feud continued with so much violence that at last half the families in Florence were banded against the other half, the rival parties being known as the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. But later on the Guelfs themselves split into two parties through an outrage similar in its origin to the older feud, and these were known as the Neri and the Bianchi, the Blacks and the Whites. Dante and most of his friends-chief among them being "the first of his friends," the poet and dare-devil young nobleman Guido Cavalcanti-belonged to the Whites, and Dante's fortunes rose and fell with the fluctuating fate of his party.

66

Exciting must have been the days of those Florentine citizens. The nobles and the rich merchants guarded their wealth and their lives behind massive stone walls that frowned down upon the narrow streets, and each family with its numerous branches and adherents congregrated in one quarter for mutual protection and combined aggressiveness. One day perhaps some notable citizen walking down a narrow alley would be set upon by band of enemies with shouts of "Neri! Neri!" or Bianchi ! Bianchi!" as the case might be. His cries for help would be answered by passing friends, and soon the clang of steel would ring down the streets, bringing up fresh foes and fresh defenders. Then a bell would clash out from a tower, blaring forth the wild tocsin, and the shouts of the combatants, the shrieks of terrorstricken women-folk, the barricading of the houses by peaceful citizens, and the shrill clatter of naked blades, would mingle in

one confused din, until at length one party would retreat to their quarter of the city, and silence would reign again in the streets where scattered corpses lay, with blood running down the gutters, lapped by foul-mouthed dogs.

Sunshine

Such was the city in which Dante lived. But though he belonged to the Guelfs and the Bianchi

and Storm. he was not a party man, in the strict sense of the term, and when in 1300 he became one of the six Priors of Florence, in whose hands was the republican government, he determined to end the constant strife, and with splendid impartiality was instrumental in banishing the turbulent leaders of both Neri and Bianchi, including his best friend Guido Cavalcanti, the poet. His term of office was a short one, and in 1301 he went on an embassy to Pope Boniface VIII. at Rome. Little though he knew it when he set out from his beloved city, this was the last time he set eyes on Florence. During his absence the blackest treachery was at work. Charles Valois, brother of the French King, came with a small army to Florence, at the invitation of the Priors, to act as arbitrator and peacemaker between the parties. But this infamous villain, on the very morrow of the day when he had sworn before the altar of God to defend the peace, was bought over by the Ghibellines and the Neri, and commenced a slaughter of the unsuspecting Guelfs. The Ghibelline party carried all before them, and gained the mastery of the Government. Their first act was to pass a condemnation of perpetual banishment against the leading members of the rival party who still survived, and against Dante especially was their vengeance directed. In his case the banishment was increased by the sentence that he was to be burnt alive if caught.

of Exile.

Exile to Dante was almost worse than death.

The Bread We in this cosmopolitan age can hardly realise the passion with which the Florentines of old yearned for their city. To them it was the only place on earth where they might live with any happiness. It was their mother, their mistress; all object in life, all ambition, all desire was taken from them if Florence could not be their home. After years of exile Dante wrote with bitter pathos: "Since it was the pleasure of the citizens of the most beautiful and most famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast me forth from her most sweet bosom

(in which I was born and nourished up to the summit of my life, and in which, with her goodwill, I desire with all my heart to rest my weary soul, and end in the time given me), I have gone through almost all the parts to which this language extends, a pilgrim, almost a beggar, showing against my will the wounds of fortune, which is wont unjustly to be ofttimes reputed to the wounded." With equal bitterness and in a flash of personal revelation, he wrote in his Divine Comedy those famous lines (which, however, translated lose half their power), "Thou shalt make trial of how salt doth taste another's bread, and how hard the path to descend and mount upon another's stair."

Dante made several attempts to return to Florence, but it was like the fruitless agony of the bird that beats its breast against the cage in the struggle to get back to the parent nest from which it has been thrust by cruel hands. At the age of fifty-five he died, worn-out and heart-broken, at Ravenna, his dying eyes gazing still towards the city of his birth.

The Divine,
Comedy."

But though his mortal body mouldered into dust his spirit lived, and still lives, on this earth. . For he left behind him as a legacy of priceless worth to all the world that Divine Comedy, which was wrought in the fierce furnace of human passion, and moulded by a genius reaching to the sublimest heights and plunging to the furthest depths of inspiration.

In that journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, which the mind of man had never before taken, Dante summed up all the learning, philosophy, and religion of his age. But with the gift that is alone possessed by supreme genius, he went beyond his age, penetrating into mysteries never before revealed, and teaching men a wisdom that few may understand and fewer still may follow. It is the story of his own soul, passionate in love and hate, filled with visions of beauty, contrasted in resplendent brightness with visions of horror inconceivable. It is the mirror of his age, in which all the turbulence that I have touched upon is faithfully depicted, and whose characters are given a literary immortality in his lines. And throughout this long and wonderful work his words are golden, his every thought translated into a perfect beauty of rhythmic speech. Art and poetry, philosophy, and even religion itself, received a new stimulus from the Divine Comedy. It fixed the form of the Italian language, taught men a thousand beauties unobserved before in daily life, lifted them

into higher spheres of intellect, and entranced the minds of men from his generation to our own by the magic spell of a vast imagination.

20. The Satire of Molière.

Every great nation at some time or another has given birth to some poet or prose-writer who has reached such a supreme height of genius that he reigns as it were in solitary glory, with no equals, and with a universal homage, acknowledged as the representative of the national wit or wisdom at its zenith. We ourselves have Shakspere, Italy has Dante, Spain has Cervantes, Germany has Goethe, and France has Molière.

France can boast of many fine poets, and many writers whose prose is perfect for its style and wonderful for its wit. In the realm of the drama, too, France takes a distinguished rank, but beyond a doubt, among all her famous names, her national genius is best displayed in the comedies of the great Molière.

Bells.

Molière is a character that impresses the imIn Cap and agination with a charm all his own. He stands aloof as it were from the age in which he lived, belonging to none of the well-defined classes into which society was then divided, and able therefore to take an impartial view of that society, as the onlooker sees most of the game. He was neither aristocrat nor bourgeois. He was labelled with no badge of narrow professionalism, which in those days more than now denoted a character moulded after a certain pattern,—the lawyer, the doctor, the soldier, the schoolmaster,—each being printed off the same cliché, the same stereotype. He was, like Shakspere, in his early days a strolling player, belonging to a body of men who were called by the law "rogues and vagabonds," and who added more to the nation's gaiety, wit, and wisdom than those whom the law was pleased to call honest men and good citizens. He was a Bohemian to the heart's core, a jester who laughed at the follies and the fashion of his time, who revelled in the droll side of life, but whose drolleries pointed the finger at sham and vice, and whose jesting tongue had a sting to satirise all canting hypocrites, and smooth-tongued villains. Molière was indeed a moralist and a preacher, but his moral was cloaked in comedy, and his sermons reached the hearts of his hearers through the medium of fun and laughter.