Ampère, Voyage Dantesque, p. 256, says: "Having been twice at Perugia, I have experienced the double effect of Mount Ubaldo, which the poet says makes this city feel the cold and heat.

'Onde Perugia sente freddo e caldo,'

that is, which by turns reflects upon it the rays of the sun, and sends it icy winds. I have but too well verified the justice of Dante's observation, particularly as regards the cold temperature, which Perugia, when it is not burning hot, owes to Mount Ubaldo. I arrived in front of this city on a brilliant autumnal night, and had time to comment at leisure upon the winds of the Ubaldo, as I slowly climbed the winding road which leads to the gates of the city fortified by a Pope."

his hermitage. From this mountain and saw visions. In the church of the summer heats are reflected, and the St. Damiano he heard a voice say three cold winds of winter blow through the times, "Francis, repair my house, Porta Sole of Perugia. The towns of which thou seest falling." In order Nocera and Gualdo are neighbouring to do this, he sold his father's horse towns, that suffered under the oppres- and some cloth at Foligno, and took sion of the Perugians. the money to the priest of St. Damiano, who to his credit refused to receive it. Through fear of his father, he hid himself; and when he reappeared in the streets was so ill-clad that the boys pelted him and called him mad. His father shut him up in his house; his mother set him free. In the presence of his father and the Bishop he renounced all right to his inheritance, even giving up his clothes, and putting en those of a servant which the Bishop gave him. He wandered about the country, singing the praises of the Lord aloud on the highways. He met with a band of robbers, and said to them, "I am the herald of the Great King." They beat him and threw him into a ditch filled with snow. He only rejoiced and sang the louder. A friend in Gubbio gave him a suit of clothes, which he wore for two years, with a girdle and a staff. He washed the feet of lepers in the hospital, and kissed their sores. He begged from door to door in Assisi for the repairs of the church of St. Damiano, and carried stones for the masons. He did the same for the church of St. Peter; he did the same for the church of Our Lady of Angels at Portiuncula, in the St. Francis was the son of Peter Ber-neighbourhood of Assisi, where he renadone, a wool-merchant of Assisi, and was born in 1182. The first glimpse we catch of him is that of a joyous youth in gay apparel, given up to pleasure, and singing with his companions through the streets of his native town, like St. Augustine in the streets of Carthage. He was in the war between Assisi and Perugia, was taken prisoner, and passed a year in confinement. On his return home a severe illness fell upon him, which gave him more serious thoughts. He again appeared in the streets of Assisi in gay apparel, but meeting a beggar, a fellow-soldier, he changed clothes with him. He now began to visit hospitals and kiss the sores of lepers. He prayed in the churches,

50. Revelation vii. 2: And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God.' These words Bonaventura applies to St. Francis, the beautiful enthusiast and Pater Seraphicus of the Church, to follow out whose wonderful life through the details of history and legend would be too long for these notes. A few hints must suffice.

mained two years. Hearing one day in church the injunction of Christ to his Apostles, "Provide neither gold nor silver, nor brass in your purse, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves," he left off shoes and staff and girdle, and girt himself with a cord, after the manner of the shepherds in that neighbourhood. This cord became the distinguishing mark of his future Order. He kissed the ulcer of a man from Spoleto, and healed him; and St. Bonaventura says, "I know not which I ought most to admire, such a kiss or such a cure.' Bernard of Quintavalle and others associated themselves with him, and the Order of the Benedictines was founded.

Y

As his convent increased, so did his his sacred wounds. His body was humility and his austerities. He sewed buried in the church of St. George his rough habit with pack-thread to at Assisi, but four years afterwards remake it rougher; he slept on the ground moved to a church outside the walls. with a stone for his pillow; he drank See Note 117 of this canto. water; he ate bread; he fasted eight lents in the year; he called his body "Brother Ass," and bound it with a halter, the cord of his Order; but a few days before his death he begged pardon of his body for having treated it so harshly. As a penance, he rolled himself naked in the snow and among brambles; he commanded his friars to revile him, and when he said, "O Brother Francis, for thy sins thou hast deserved to be plunged into hell;" Brother Leo was to answer, "It is true; thou hast deserved to be buried in the very bottom of hell."

In 1215 his convent was removed to Alvernia, among the solitudes of the Apennines. In 1219 he went to Egypt to convert the Sultan, and preached to him in his camp near Damietta, but without the desired effect. He returned to the duties of his convent with unabated zeal; and was sometimes seen by his followers lifted from the ground by the fervour of his prayers; and here he received in a vision of the Crucifixion the stigmata in his hands and feet and side. Butler, Lives of the Saints, X. 100, says: "The marks of nails began to appear on his hands and feet, resembling those he had seen in the vision of the man crucified. His hands and feet seemed bored through in the middle with four wounds, and these holes appeared to be pierced with nails of hard flesh; the heads were round and black, and were seen in the palms of his hands, and in his feet in the upper part of the instep. The points were long, and appeared beyond the skin on the other side, and were turned back as if they had been clenched with a hammer. There was also in his right side a red wound, as if made by the piercing of a lance; and this often threw out blood, which stained the tunic and drawers of the paint.

Two years afterwards St. Francis died, exclaiming, "Welcome, Sister Death; and multitudes came to kiss

In the life of St. Francis it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the facts of history and the myths of tradition; but through all we see the outlines of a gentle, beautiful, and noble character. All living creatures were his brothers and sisters. To him the lark was an emblem of the Cherubim, and the lamb an image of the Lamb of God. He is said to have preached to the birds; and his sermon was, "Brother birds, greatly are ye bound to praise the Creator, who clotheth you with feathers, and giveth you wings to fly with, and a purer air to breathe, and who careth for you, who have so little care for yourselves."

Forsyth, describing his visit to Ia Verna, Italy, p. 123, says: "Francis appears to me a genuine hero, original, independent, magnanimous, incorruptible. His powers seemed designed to regenerate society; but, taking a wrong direction, they sank men into beggars.'

Finally, the phrase he often uttered when others praised him may be here repeated, "What every one is in the eyes of God, that he is and no more."

51. Namely, in winter, when the sun is far south; or, as Biagioli prefers, glowing with unwonted splendour.

53. It will be noticed that there is a play of words on the name Ascesi (I ascended), which Padre Venturi irreverently calls a concetto di tre quattrini.

59. His vow of poverty, in opposition to the wishes of his father. 61. In the presence of his father and of the Bishop of the diocese.

65. After the death of Christ, she waited eleven hundred years and more till St. Francis came.

67. The story of Caesar's waking the fisherman Amyclas to take him across the Adriatic is told by Lucan, Pharsalia, V. :—

"There through the gloom his searching eyes explored,

Where to the mouldering rock a bark was
mocred.

The mighty master of this little boat
Securely slept within a neighbouring cot

counsels. Seeing the extraordinary conduct of St. Francis, he invited him

to sup at his house, and had a good bed made ready for him near his own. When Bernard seemed to be fallen asleep, the servant of God arose, and falling on his knees, with his eyes lifted up, and his arms across, repeated very slow, with abundance of tears, the

Bestowed by Heaven, but seldom understood! whole night, Deus meus et Omnia, My

God and my All.'. . . . Bernard secretly
watched the saint all night, by the light
of a lamp, saying to himself, This man
is truly a servant of God;' and admiring
the happiness of such a one, whose
heart is entirely filled with God, and to

See in what peace the poor Amyclas lies,
Nor starts, though Cæsar's call commands to whom the whole world is nothing.

eminence and happiness than Brother gular convent, which stands on the cliffs Bonaventure with all his learning.' of a lofty Apennine, was built by St. After this he fell into an ecstacy, in which he continued in sweet contemplation without motion for the space of hree hours."

Francis himself, and is celebrated for
the miracle which the motto records.
Here reigns all the terrible of nature,-
a rocky mountain, a ruin of the ele-
ments, broken, sawn, and piled in
sublime confusion,-precipices crowne!
with old, gloomy, visionary woods,-
black chasms in the rock where curi-
osity shudders to look down,-haunted
caverns, sanctified by miraculous crosses,

Sylvester, the third disciple, was a priest who sold stone to St. Francis for the repairs of the church of St. Damiano. Some question arising about the payment, St. Francis thrust his hand into Bernard's bosom and drew forth a handful of gold, which he added-long excavated stairs that restore you to the previous payment. Sylvester, smitten with remorse that he, an old man, should be so greedy of gold, while a young man despised it for the love of God, soon after became a disciple of the saint.

89. Peter Bernadone, the father of St. Francis, was a wool-merchant. Of this humble origin the saint was not ashamed.

93. The permission to establish his religious Order, granted by Pope Innocent III., in 1214.

96. Better here in heaven by the Angels, than on earth by Franciscan friars in their churches, as the custom was. Or perhaps, as Buti interprets it, better above in the glory of Paradise, "where is the College of all the Saints," than here in the Sun.

98. The permission to found the Order of Minor Friars, or Franciscans, granted by Pope Innocent III., in 1214, was confirmed by Pope Honorius III., in 1223.

99. The title of Archimandrite, or Patriarch, was given in the Greek Church to one who had supervision

over many convents.

101. Namely, before the Sultan of Egypt in his camp near Damietta.

104. In the words of Ben Jonson,

"Potential merit stands for actual,

Where only opportunity doth want,
Not will nor power."

106. On Mount Alvernia, St. Francis, absorbed in prayer, received in his hands and feet and breast the stigmata of Christ, that is, the wounds of the nails and the spear of the crucifixion, the final seal of the Order.

Forsyth, Italy, p. 122: "This sin

to daylight..... On entering the Chapel of the Stigmata, we caught the religion of the place; we knelt round the rail, and gazed with a kind of local devotion at the holy spot where St. Francis received the five wounds of Christ. The whole hill is legendary ground Here the Seraphic Father was saluted by two crows which still haunt the convent; there the Devil hurled him down a precipice, yet was not permitted to bruise a bone of him."

117. When St. Francis was dying, he desired to be buried among the malefactors at the place of execution, called the Colle d'Inferno, or Hill of Hell. A church was afterwards built on this spot; its name was changed to Colle di Paradiso, and the body of the saint transferred thither in 1230. The popular tradition is, that it is standing upright under the principal altar of the chapel devoted to the saint.

118. If St. Francis were as here described, what must his companion, St. Dominic, have been, who was Patriarch, or founder of the Order to which Thomas Aquinas belonged. To the degeneracy of this Order the remainder of the canto is devoted.

137. The Order of the Dominicans diminished in numbers, by its members going in search of prelacies and other ecclesiastical offices, till it is like a tree hacked and hewn.

138. Buti interprets this passage dif

ferently. He says: "Vedrail corregger; that is, thou, Dante, shalt see St. Dominic, whom he calls corregger, because he wore about his waist the correggia, or leathern thong, and made his friars wear it, as St. Franc's made his wear the cord;-che argomenta, that

58. Dante believed with Thomas Aquinas, that "the creation and infusion" of the soul were simultaneous.

60. Before the birth of St. Dominic, his mother dreamed that she had brought forth a dog, spotted black and white, Ovid, Met., III., Ad- and bearing a lighted torch in his mouth;