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106. The two noble families of Ve rona, the Montagues and Capulets, whose quarrels have been made familiar to the English-speaking world by Romeo and Juliet :

towards Siena. He rode still, seemingly the nations, all the free Italian cities, in in full vigour and activity. But the fatal possession of their rights and old muniair of Rome had smitten his strength. cipal institutions." A carbuncle had formed under his knee; injudicious remedies inflamed his vitiated blood. He died at Buonconvento, in the midst of his awe struck army, on the festival of St. Bartholomew. Rumours of foul practice, of course, spread abroad; a Dominican monk was said to have administered poison in the Sacrament, which he received with profound devotion. His body was carried in sad state, and splendidly interred at Pisa.

"So closed that empire, in which, if the more factious and vulgar Ghibellines beheld their restoration to their native city, their triumph, their revenge, their sole administration of public affairs, the nobler Ghibellinism of Dante foresaw the establishment of a great universal monarchy necessary to the peace and civilization of mankind. The ideal sovereign | of Dante's famous treatise on Monarchy was Henry of Luxembourg. Dante nor his time can be understood but through this treatise. The attempt of the Pope to raise himself to a great pontifical monarchy had manifestly ignominiously failed: the Ghibelline is neither amazed nor distressed at this event. It is now the turn of the Imperialist to unfold his noble vision. An universal monarchy is absolutely necessary for the welfare of the world;' and this is part of his singular reasoning: 'Peace,' (says the weary exile, the man worn out in cruel strife, the wanderer from city to city, each of those cities more fiercely torn by faction than the last,) 'universal Peace is the first blessing of mankind. The angels sang, not riches or pleasures, but peace on earth: peace the Lord bequeathed to his disciples. For peace One must rule. Mankind is most like God when at unity, for God is One; therefore under a monarchy. Where there is parity there must be strife; where strife, judgment; the judge must be a third party intervening with supreme authority.' Without monarchy tan be no justice, nor even liberty; for Dante's monarch is no arbitrary despot, out a constitutional sovereign; he is the Roman law impersonated in the Emperor; a monarch who should leave all

"Three civil brawls, bred of an airy word,
By thee, old Capulet and Montague,
Have thrice disturbed the quiet of our streets,
And made Verona's ancient citizens
Cast by their grave beseeming ornaments,
To wield old partisans, in hands as old,
Cankered with peace, to part your cankered
hate."

107. Families of Orvieto.

III. Santafiore is in the neighbourhood of Siena, and much infested with banditti.

112. The state of Rome in Dante's time is thus described by Mr. Norton, Travel and Study, pp. 246–248:

"On the slope of the Quirinal Hill, in Neither the quiet enclosure of the convent of St. Catherine of Siena, stands a square, brick tower, seven stories high. It is a conspicuous object in any general view of Rome; for there are few other towers so tall, and there is not a single spire or steeple in the city. It is the Torre delle Milizie. It was begun by Pope Gregory the Ninth, and finished near the end of the thirteenth century by his vigorous and warlike successor, Boniface the Eighth. Many such towers were built for the purposes of private warfare, in those times when the streets of Rome were the fighting-places of its noble families; but this is, perhaps, the only one that now remains undiminished in height and unaltered in appearance. It was a new building when Dante visited Rome; and it is one of the very few edifices that still preserve the aspect they then presented. The older ruins have been greatly changed in appearance, and most of the structures of the Middle Ages have disappeared, in the vicissitudes of the last few centuries. The Forum was then filled with a confused mass of ruins and miserable dwellings, with no street running through their intricacies. The Capitol was surrounded with uneven battlemented walls, and bore the character and look of an irre

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118. This recalls Pope's Universal Prayer,—

"Father of all! in every age,

In every clime, adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!"

125. Not the great Roman general
who took Syracuse, after Archimedes
had defended it so long with his engines
and burning-glasses, but a descendant of
his, who in the civil wars took part with
Pompey and was banished by Cæsar.
Pope's Essay on Man, Ep. IV. 257 :-
"And more true joy Marcellus exiled feels,
Than Cæsar with a senate at his heels."

gular citadel. St. Peter's was a low was building her Cathedral and her basilica; the Colosseum had suffered Campanile, and Orvieto her matchless little from the attacks of Popes or princes, Duomo,-while Pisa was showing her neither the Venetian nor the Farnese piety and her wealth in her Cathedral, palace having as yet been built with her Camposanto, her Baptistery, and stones from its walls; and centuries were her Tower,-while Siena was beginning still to pass before Michael Angelo, a church greater and more magnificent Bernini, and Borromini were to stamp its in design than her shifting fortune would present character upon the face of the permit her to complete,-Rome was modern city. The siege and burning of building neither cathedral nor campanile, Rome by Robert Guiscard, in 1084, may but was selling the marbles of her ancient be taken as the dividing-line between temples and tombs to the builders of the city of the Emperors and the city of other cities, or quarrying them for her the Popes, between ancient and modern own mean uses.' Rome. Rome was in a state of too deep depression, its people were too turbulent and unsettled, to have either the spirit or the opportunity for great works. There was no established and recognized authority, no regular course of justice. There was not even any strong force, rarely any overwhelming violence, which for a time at least could subdue opposition, and organize a steady, and consequently a beneficent tyranny. The city was continually distracted by petty personal quarrels, and by bitter family feuds. Its obscure annals are full of bloody civil victories and defeats, — victories which brought no gain to those who won them, defeats which taught no lesson to those who lost them. The breath of liberty never inspired with life the dead clay of Rome; and though for "It was not the simple movement a time it might seem to kindle some vital of one great body against another; not heat, the glow soon grew cold, and the force of a government in opposition speedily disappeared. The records of to the people; not the struggle of Florence, Siena, Bologna, and Perugia privilege and democracy, of poverty are as full of fighting and bloodshed as and riches, or starvation and repletion; those of Rome; but their fights were but one universal burst of unmitigated not mere brawls, nor were their triumphs anarchy. In the streets, lanes, and always barren. Even the twelfth and squares, in the courts of palaces and thirteenth centuries, which were like the humbler dwellings, were heard the coming of the spring after a long winter, clang of arms, the screams of victims, making the earth to blossom, and glad- and the gush of blood: the bow of dening the hearts of men,-the centuries the bridegroom launched its arrows which elsewhere in Italy, and over the into the very chambers of his young rest of Europe, gave birth to the noblest bride's parents and relations, and the medieval Art, when every great city was bleeding son, the murdered brother, or adorning itself with the beautiful works the dying husband were the evening of the new architecture, sculpture, and visitors of Florentine maids and mapainting, even these centuries left trons, and aged citizens. Every art scarcely any token of their passage over was practised to seduce and deceive, Rome. The sur., breaking through the and none felt secure even of their tlouds that had long hidden it, shone nearest and dearest relatives. In the everywhere but here. While Florence morning a son left his paternal roof

127. Of the state of Florence, Napier writes, Flor. Hist., I. 122:

those which were better adapted to existing circumstances and the forward movement of man. There are certain fundamental laws necessarily permanent and admitted by all communities, as there are certain moral and theological truths acknowledged by all religions; but these broad frames or outlines are commonly filled up with a thick network of subordinate regulations, that cover them like cobwebs, and often impede the march of improvement. The Florentines were early aware of this, and therefore revised their laws and institutions more or less frequently and sometimes factiously, according to the turbulent or tranquil condition of the times; but in 1394, after forty years' omission, an officer was nominated for that purpose, but whether permanently or not is doubtful."

with undiminished love, and returned their statutes and ordinances, a weedat evening a corpse, or the most bitter ing out, as it were, of the obsolete and enemy! Terror and death were tri- contradictory, and a substitution of umphant; there was no relaxation, no peace by day or night: the crash of the stone, the twang of the bow, the whizzing shaft, the jar of the trembling mangonel from tower and turret, were the dismal music of Florence, not only for hours and days, but months and years. Doors, windows, the jutting galleries and roofs, were all defended, and yet all unsafe: no spot was sacred, no tenement secure in the dead of night, the most secret chambers, the very hangings, even the nuptial bed itself, were often known to conceal an enemy. "Florence in those days was studded with lofty towers; most of the noble families possessed one or more, at least two hundred feet in height, and many of them far above that altitude. These were their pride, their family citadels; and jealously guarded; glittering with arms and men, and instruments of war. Every connecting balcony was alive with soldiers; the battle raged above and below, within and without; stones rained in showers, arrows flew thick and fast on every side; the seraglj, or barricades, were attacked and defended by chosen bands armed with lances and boar-spears; foes were in ambush at every corner, watching the bold or heedless enemy; confusion was everywhere triumphant, a demon seemed to possess the community, and the public mind, reeling with hatred, was steady only in the pursuit of blood. Yet so accustomed did they at last become to this fiendish life, that one day they fought, the next caroused together in drunken gambols, foe with foe, boasting of their mutual prowess; nor was it until after nearly five years of reciprocal destruction, that, from mere lassitude, they finally ceased thus to mangle each other, and, as it were for relaxation, turned their fury on the neighbouring states."

147. Upon this subject Napier, Flor. Hist., II. 626, remarks:

"A characteristic, and, if discreetly handled, a wise regulation of the Florentines, notwithstanding Dante's sarcasms, was the periodical revision of

CANTO VII.

6. See Canto III. Note 7.

28. Limbo, Inf. IV. 25, the "fore. most circle that surrounds the abyss."

"There, in so far as I had power to hear,

Were lamentations none, but only sighs, Which tremulous made the everlasting air. And this was caused by sorrow without tor. ment

Which the crowds had, that many were and great,

Of infants and of women and of men."

34. The three Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity.

36. The four Cardinal Virtues, Pru dence, Justice, Fortitude, and Tempe

rance.

44. John xii. 35: "Then Jesus said unto them, Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth."

70. In the Middle Ages the longing for rest and escape from danger, which found its expression in cloisters, is expressed in poetry by descriptions of flowery, secluded meadows, suggesting the classic meadows of Asphodel. Dante

has given one already in the Inferno, "Now, almost in the opening of the Purgatory, as at the entrance

us:

"I, Gonzalo de Bercéo, in the gentle summer-
tide,

Wending upon a pilgrimage, came to a meadow's
side;
All green was it and beautiful, with flowers far

and wide,

A pleasant spot, I ween, wherein the traveller might abide.

Flowers with the sweetest odours filled all the

sunny air,

And not alone refreshed the sense, but stole the

mind from care;

On every side a fountain gushed, whose waters pure and fair

and gives another here. Compare with these the following of the Inferno, we find a company from The Miracles of Our Lady, by of great ones resting in a grassy Gonzalo de Bercéo, a monk of Cala- place. But the idea of the grass now horra, who lived in the thirteenth cen- is very different. The word now used tury, and is the oldest of the Castilian is not enamel,' but 'herb,' and inpoets whose name has come down to stead of being merely green, it is covered with flowers of many colours. With the usual mediæval accuracy, Dante insists on telling us precisely what these colours were, and how bright; which he does by naming the actual pigments used in illumination,—‘Gold, and fine silver, and cochineal, and white lead, and Indian wood, serene and lucid, and fresh emerald, just broken, would have been excelled, as less is by greater, by the flowers and grass of the place.' It is evident that the 'emerald' here means the emerald green of the illuminators; for a fresh emerald is no brighter that one which is not fresh, and Dante was not one to throw away his words thus, Observe, then, we have here the idea of the growth, life, and variegation of the green herb,' as opposed to the smalto of the Inferno; but the colours of the variegation are illustrated and defined by the reference to actual pigments; and, observe, because the other colours are rather bright, the blue ground (Indian wood, indigo?) is sober; lucid, but serene; and presently two angels enter, who are dressed in the green drapery, but of a paler green than the grass, which Dante marks, by telling us that it was 'the green of leaves just budded.'

Ice-cold beneath the summer sun, but warm in

winter were.

There on the thick and shadowy trees, amid

the foliage green,

Were the fig and the pomegranate, the pear and apple seen,

And other fruits of various kinds, the tufted

leaves between ;

None were unpleasant to the taste and none decayed, I ween.

The verdure of the meadow green, the odour

of the flowers,

The grateful shadows of the trees, tempered with
fragrant showers,
Refreshed me in the burning heat of the sultry

noontide hours;

O, one might live upon the balm and fragrance

of those bowers.

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"In all this, I wish the reader to observe two things: first, the general carefulness of the poet in defining colour, distinguishing it precisely as a painter would (opposed to the Greek carelessness about it); and, secondly, his re garding the grass for its greenness and variegation, rather than, as a Greek would have done, for its depth and freshness. This greenness or brightness, and variegation, are taken up by later and modern poets, as the things intended to be chiefly expressed by the word enamelled; and, gradually, the term is taken to indicate any kind of bright and interchangeable colouring;

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there being always this much of propriety about it, when used of greenward, that such sward is indeed, like enamel, a coat of bright colour on a comparatively dark ground; and is thus a sort of natural jewelry and painter's work, different from loose and large vegetation. The word is often awkwardly and falsely used, by the later poets, of all kinds of growth and colour; as by Milton of the flowers of Paradise showing themselves over its wall; but it retains, nevertheless, through all its jaded inanity, some halfunconscious vestige of the old sense, even to the present day."

82. The old church hymn attributed to Arminius or Hermann, Count of Vehringen, in the eleventh century, beginning :

Salve Regina, mater misericordiæ,
Vita, dulcedo et spes nostra, salve."

of Kamberg in the middle of the Danube, under a tent whose curtains should be closed to spare him public mortification. Ottocar presented himself covered with gold and jewels; Rudolph, by way of superior pomp, received him in his simplest dress; and in the middle of the ceremony the curtains of the tent fell, and revealed to the eyes of the people and of the armies, that lined the Danube, the proud Ottocar cn his knees, with his hands clasped in the hands of his conqueror, whom he had often called his maître d'hôtel, and whose Grand-Seneschal he now became. This story is accredited, and it is of little importance whether it be true or not."

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But the wife was not quiet under this humiliation, and excited him to revolt against Rudolph. He was again overcome, and killed in battle in 1278. 101. This Winceslaus, says the Ot 94. Rudolph of Hapsburg, first Em-timo, was most beautiful among all peror of the house of Austria. was men; but was not a man of arms; crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1273. he was a meek and humble ecclesiastic, "It is related,” says Voltaire, Annales and did not live long." Why Dante de l'Empire, I. 303, "that, as the im- accuses him of living in luxury and ease perial sword, which they pretended was does not appear. that of Charlemagne, could not be found, several lords made this defect in the formalities a pretext for not taking the oath of allegiance. He seized a crucifix; This is my sceptre, he said, and all paid homage to him. This single act of firmness made him respected, and the rest of his conduct showed him to be worthy of the Empire.

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He would not go to Rome to be crowned, and took so little interest in Italian affairs, that Italy became almost independent of the Empire, which seems greatly to disturb the mind of Dante. He died in 1291.

103. Philip the Third of France, sur. named the Bold (1270-1285). Having invaded Catalonia, in a war with Peter the Third of Aragon, both by land and sea, he was driven back, and died at Perpignan during the retreat.

104. He with the benign aspect, who rests his cheek upon his hand, is Henry of Navarre, surnamed the Fat, and brother of "Good King Thibault," Inf. XXII. 52. An old French chronicle quoted by Philalethes says, that, "though it is a general opinion that fat men are of a gentle and benign nature, nevertheless this one was very harsh."

109. Philip the Fourth of France, 100. Ottocar the Second, king of surnamed the Fair, son of Philip the Bohemia, who is said to have refused | Third, and son-in-law of Henry of the imperial crown. He likewise re- Navarre (1285-1314). fused to pay homage to Rudolph, whom 112. Peter the Third of Aragon (1276– he used to call his maître d'hôtel, de- 1285), the enemy of Charles of Anjou claring he had paid his wages and owed and competitor with him for the kinghim nothing. Whereupon Rudolph at-dom of Sicily. He is counted among tacked and subdued him. According to the Troubadours, and when Philip the Voltaire, Annales de l'Empire, I. 306, Bold invaded his kingdom, Peter "he consented to pay homage to the launched a song against him, comEmperor as his liege lord, in the island plaining that the "flower-de-luce kept

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