and of his terrors, of his emotions of pity, as well as his moments of indignation and wrath. It is with him that we undergo the glare of the flames of Hell, with him that we shiver in the icy blasts of Cocytus. Were once his presence removed, in an instant the illusive image, which had kept our hearts and minds in subjection, would vanish likewise. It is among the torments of Hell and the penances of Purgatory that we see Dante in all his humanity. His flight from the wild beasts; his horror on first witnessing the sufferings of the damned, which caused him twice, during his single night in Hell, to swoon away; his outbursts of rage against some of the most vile and contemptible characters; the rousing of his family pride on hearing his ancestors disparaged; his tender, gentle compassion for the renowned Imperial Chancellor, Pier delle Vigne (like himself victim of Envy and Calumny); his sympathetic treatment of his old master in science, Brunetto Latini, as well as of his companions in guilt, the three great Florentines.

In Purgatory, too, we see Dante's humanity even more strongly exhibited. His sense of shame at being compelled to exchange his slow dignified walk for a quick run; his breathlessness when climbing up the lower slopes of the Mountain; his drowsiness on the approach of each successive night of the three days he spent on the Mountain of Purgatory; his self-consciousness of his sin of Pride; his swoon on

* Brunetto Latini "is commonly supposed (from a misunderstanding of Inf. xv, 82-85) to have been Dante's master, which in the ordinary sense of the word he cannot have been, since he was about 55 when Dante was born." (Dict. of Works of Dante, by Paget Toynbee, Oxford, 1898, s.v. "Brunetto").

d

being rebuked by Beatrice on the banks of the ri Lethe-all reveal him to us as the Man, with all emotions, all his impulses and all his failings.

There is one quality that he exhibits in himse which is a singular contrast to the character traditio gives him of having fought as a brave soldier at th battle of Campaldino, and that is, his pusillanimity (if the expression is not too strong) whilst journeying through Hell and Purgatory. He is always afraid; he is continually relating his fears. He clutches hold of Virgil in frantic terror, he hides himself behind his shoulders. We must not forget that the Divina Commedia is all fiction, and that probably Dante's assumed cowardice is merely an artist's device to intensify the horror of what he describes.

Two curious pictures he gives us of the barbarous punishments of his times. The one, where he minutely describes the custom then prevalent of binding a robber to a stake, and afterwards planting him head downwards in a hole dug for the purpose; and how the friar bent down to hear the confession of the inverted malefactor, before the moment when the hole would be filled up and the victim choked.

The other picture is when Virgil, in obedience to the call of the Angel, urges Dante to walk through the zone of fire which alone separates him from the stairway to the Earthly Paradise where he is to meet Beatrice. All Dante's horror-struck feelings are aroused to the highest degree, and his highly-wrought imagination recalls the ghastly and sickening details he has witnessed of criminals being burned at the stake; nor must we forget that his mind would have

good cause to dwell upon this, seeing that he had himself been condemned (in contumaciam) to die that same horrible death, should he ever again fall into the hands of those relentless foes, who were making his beloved Florence a Hell upon earth. It is a beautiful and touching incident of his life, that when he had already attained to the first rank as a man of letters; when his learning and science had earned for him a world-wide reputation, he could yet, in those lines of infinite pathos and beauty (Par. XXV, 1-9), exclaim that the dearest thing he could hope for on earth would be, that the recognition of his great poem might earn for him a recall from banishment, in order that, returning home, and kneeling humbly in the beautiful place of his baptism, which he elsewhere calls il mio bel San Giovanni (Inf. xix), he might there, and there only, receive the laurel crown of a poet. In comparison with the joy of being re-admitted into his native city-but readmitted without dishonour-all earthly distinctions in his eyes were valueless.

He had apparently travelled in foreign countries, without however contracting any love for foreign nations, i.e. where he speaks of them collectively as nations. Germans, Frisons, Spaniards, are mentioned with more or less indifference, but the French he evidently regarded as the real enemies of his country, on account of whom the matrons of Florence lay deserted in their beds,* France having drawn away their husbands, either for commerce or for war; and to the French he makes allusion, sometimes in

*Par. xv, 118-120.

derision of their vanity, but far oftener as to their being the true disturbers of the peace of his beloved Italy.

His world is Italy-his State is Tuscany-his city is Florence.

VIII.

GIOTTO'S PORTRAIT OF DANTE IN THE BARGELLO.

Of the many pictures and busts which claim to represent Dante, there are but two which can be regarded as likenesses of genuine authenticity. These are (a) the death-mask in the Museum of Florence, and (b) the portrait by Giotto in the Bargello. The former will be found as the frontispiece of my Readings on the Inferno, the latter forms the frontispiece of my Readings on the Purgatorio. It is with this latter that I am chiefly concerned. The most competent observers have come to the conclusion that the resemblance of the portrait to the cast is unmistakable.

Filippo Villani, in his Life of Giotto, says that in a painting on the walls of the chapel of the Bargello, then known as the Palazzo del Podestà, Giotto had introduced portraits of himself and of Dante, but he does not mention the circumstance in his own life of Dante. The only one of the early biographers who does allude to it is Landino, who, after naming two portraits of Dante, one in Santa Croce, and the other in the Cappella del Podestà, says of the latter "resta ancora." Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters (Vita di Giotto), speaks of the Bargello portrait as still seen.

in his own time, and he is the first to state that the same picture included portraits of Brunetto Latini and Corso Donati. These passages in Villani and Vasari aroused much attention with the revival of Dante studies in Italy at the beginning of the last century, and both Moreni about 1800, and Missirini in 1832, made prolonged though ineffectual search for the portraits. In 1840 the work was energetically taken in hand by Seymour Kirkup, an English artist, Alberico Bezzi, a Piedmontese, and Richard Henry Wilde, an American. They obtained permission from the authorities to clear the chapel of the Bargello and remove the plaster, and had associated with them-most unfortunately as it turned out-a certain Antonio Marini, an unsuccessful painter of Pisa. For a long time their labours were in vain, for the walls were so thickly covered with plaster that they could only remove it very slowly and carefully. At last, on the 21st July, 1840, they came upon the painting, and saw Dante's face with all the freshness of youth upon it, and before sorrow and disappointment had marked their indelible traces upon his noble countenance. He is represented as the middle figure in a group of three, while the other two figures seem to bear out the statements of F. Villani and Vasari that they are those of Corso Donati and Brunetto Latini. Dante's dress appears to be the ordinary civil costume of the upper classes, and is similar to his attire in Michelino's portrait of him in the Duomo. His hair is entirely concealed by the cap, so that one cannot verify the tradition of its having been auburn-tinted in his youth. He carries