was the father of the "good Gualdrada," whose story shines out so pleasantly in Boccaccio's commentary. See Inf. XVI. Note 37.

115. "Two ancient houses of the city," says the Ottimo; "and he saw the chiefs of these houses were content with leathern jerkins without any drapery; he who should dress so now-adays would be laughed at: and he saw their dames spinning, as who should say, Now-a-days not even the maid will spin, much less the lady.'" And Buti upon the same text: "They wore leathern dresses without any cloth over them; they did not make to themselves long robes, nor cloaks of scarlet lined with vaire, as they do now."

120. They were not abandoned by their husbands, who, content with little, did not go to traffic in France.

128. Monna Cianghella della Tosa was a gay widow of Florence, who led such a life of pleasure that her name has passed into a proverb, or a common name for a dissolute woman.

Lapo Salterello was a Florentine lawyer, and a man of dissipated habits; and Crescimbeni, whose mill grinds everything that comes to it, counts him among the poets, Volgar Poesia, III. 82, and calls him a Rimatore di non poco grido, a rhymer of no little renown. Unluckily he quotes one of his sonnets.

129. Quinctius, surnamed Cincinnatus from his neglected locks, taken from his plough and made Dictator by the Roman Senate, and, after he had defeated the Volscians and saved the city, returning to his plough again.

Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus, and mother of the Gracchi, who preferred for her husband a Roman citizen to a king, and boasted that her children were her only jewels.

Shakespeare, Tit. Andron., IV. 1:— "Ah, boy, Cornelia never with more care Read to her sons, than she hath read to thee Sweet poetry, and Tully's Orator."

133. The Virgin Mary, invoked in the pains of child-birth, as mentioned Purg. XX. 19:

"And I by peradventure heard 'Sweet Mary!'

Uttered in front of us amid the weeping,
Even as a woman does who is in child-birth."

134. The Baptistery of the church. of St. John in Florence; il mio bel San Giovanni, my beautiful St. John, as Dante calls it, Inf. XIX. 17.

135. Of this ancestor of Dante, Cacciaguida, nothing is known but what the poet here tells us, and so clearly that it is not necessary to repeat it in prose.

137. Cacciaguida's wife came from Ferrara in the Val di Pado, or Val di Po, the Valley of the Po. She was of the Aldighieri or Alighieri family, and from her Dante derived his surname.

139. The Emperor Conrad III. of Swabia, uncle of Frederic Barbarossa. In 1143 he joined Louis VII. of France in the Second Crusade, of which St. Bernard was the great preacher. He died in 1152, after his return from this crusade.

140. Cacciaguida was knighted by the Emperor Conrad.

143. The law or religion of Maho

met.

1. The Heaven of Mars continued. Boethius, De Cons. Phil., Book III. Prosa 6, Ridpath's Tr.: "But who is there that does not perceive the emptiness and futility of what men dignify with the name of high extraction, or nobility of birth? The splendor you attribute to this is quite foreign to you for nobility of descent is nothing else but the credit derived from the merit of your ancestors. If it is the applause of mankind, and nothing besides, that illustrates and confers fame upon a person, no others can be celebrated and famous, but such as are universally applauded. If you are not therefore esteemed illustrious from your own worth, you can derive no real splendor from the merits of others: so that, in my opinion, nobility is in no other respect good, than as it imposes an obligation upon its possessors not to degenerate from the merit of their ancestors."

10. The use of You for Thou, the plural for the singular, is said to have been introduced in the time of Julius Cæsar. Lucan, V., Rowe's Tr.: "Then was the time when sycophants began To heap all titles on one lordly man." Dante uses it by way of compliment to his ancestor; though he says the descendants of the Romans were not so persevering in its use as other Italians.

14. Beatrice smiled to give notice to Dante that she observed his flattering style of address; as the Lady of Male39

VOL. III.

hault coughed when she saw Launcelot kiss Queen Guinevere, as related in the old romance of Launcelot of the Lake. 20. Rejoiced within itself that it can endure so much joy.

25. The city of Florence, which, in Canto XXV. 5, Dante calls "the fair sheepfold, where a lamb I slumbered." It will be remembered that St. John the Baptist is the patron saint of Flor

ence.

33. Not in Italian, but in Latin, which was the language of cultivated people in Cacciaguida's time.

34. From the Incarnation of Christ down to his own birth, the planet Mars had returned to the sign of the Lion five hundred and eighty times, or made this number of revolutions in its orbit. Brunetto Latini, Dante's schoolmaster, Tresor, I. Ch. cxi., says, that Mars "goes through all the signs in ii. years and i. month and xxx. days." This would make Cacciaguida born. long after the crusade in which he died. But Dante, who had perhaps seen the astronomical tables of King Alfonso of Castile, knew more of the matter than his schoolmaster, and was aware that the period of a revolution of Mars is less than two years. Witte, who cites these tables in his notes to this canto, says they give "686 days 22 hours and 24 minutes"; and continues: "Five hundred and eighty such revolutions give then (due regard being had to the leap-years) 1090 years and not

quite four months. Cacciaguida, therefore, at the time of the Second Crusade, was in his fifty-seventh year."

Pietro di Dante (the poet's son and commentator, and who, as Biagioli, with rather gratuitous harshness, says, was "smaller compared to his father than a point is to the universe ") assumed two years as a revolution of Mars; but as this made Cacciaguida born in 1160, twelve years after his death, he suggested the reading of "three," instead of "thirty," in the text, which reading was adopted by the Cruscan Academy, and makes the year of Cacciaguida's birth 1106.

But that Dante computed the revolution of Mars at less than two years is evident from a passage in the Convito, II. 15, referred to by Philalethes, where he speaks of half a revolution of this planet as un anno quasi, almost a year. The common reading of " thirty" is undoubtedly then the true one.

In Astrology, the Lion is the House of the Sun; but Mars, as well as the Sun and Jupiter, is a Lord of the Lion; and hence Dante says "its Lion."

41. The house in which Cacciaguida was born stood in the Mercato Vecchio, or Old Market, at the beginning of the last ward or sesto of Florence toward the east, called the Porta San Pietro.

The city of Florence was originally divided into Quarters or Gates, which were, San Pancrazio on the west, San Pietro on the east, the Duomo on the north, and Santa Maria on the south. Afterwards, when the new walls were

built and the city enlarged, these Quarters were changed to Sesti, or Sixths, by dividing Santa Maria into the Borgo and San Pietro Scheraggio, and adding the Oltrarno (beyond the Arno) on the southern bank.

42. The annual races of Florence on the 24th of June, the festival of St. John the Baptist. The prize was the Pallio, or mantle of "crimson silk velvet," as Villani says; and the race was run from San Pancrazio, the western ward of the city, through the Mercato Vecchio, to the eastern ward of San Piero. According to Benvenuto, the Florentine races were horse-races; but the Pallio of Verona, where the prize was the "Green Mantle," was manifestly a foot-race. See Inf. XV. 122.

47. Between the Ponte Vecchio, where once stood the statue of Mars, and the church of St. John the Baptist.

50. Campi is a village between Prato and Florence, in

"The valley whence Bisenzio descends." Certaldo is in the Val d' Elsa, and is chiefly celebrated as being the birthplace of Boccaccio,-"true Bocca d' Oro, or Mouth of Gold," says Benvenuto, with enthusiasm, "my venerated master, and a most diligent and familiar student of Dante, and who wrote a certain book that greatly helps us to understand him."

Figghine, or Figline, is a town in the Val d'Arno, some twelve miles distant from Florence; and hateful to Dante as the birthplace of the "ribald law

yer, Ser Dego," as Campi was of another ribald lawyer, Ser Fozio ; and Certaldo of a certain Giacomo, who thrust the Podestà of Florence from his seat, and undertook to govern the city. These men, mingling with the old Florentines, corrupted the simple manners of the town.

53. Galluzzo lies to the south of Florence on the road to Siena, and Trespiano about the same distance to the north, on the road to Bologna.

56. Aguglione and Signa are also Tuscan towns in the neighborhood of Florence. According to Covino, Descriz. Geog. dell' Italia, p. 18, it was a certain Baldo d' Aguglione, who condemned Dante to be burned; and Bonifazio da Signa, according to Buti, "tyrannized over the city, and sold the favors and offices of the Commune."

58. The clergy. "Popes, cardinals, bishops, and archbishops, who govern the Holy Church," says Buti; and continues: "If the Church had been a mother, instead of a step-mother to the Emperors, and had not excommunicated, and persecuted, and published them as heretics, Italy would have been well governed, and there would have been none of those civil wars, that dismantled and devastated the smaller towns, and drove their inhabitants into Florence, to trade and discount."

Napier, Florent. Hist., I. 597, says: "The Arte del Cambio, or moneytrade, in which Florence shone preeminent, soon made her bankers known and almost necessary to all Europe.....

But amongst all foreign nations they were justly considered, according to the admission of their own countrymen, as hard, griping, and exacting; they were called Lombard dogs; hated and insulted by nations less acquainted with trade and certainly less civilized. than themselves, when they may only have demanded a fair interest for money lent at a great risk to lawless men in a foreign country. . . . . All countinghouses of Florentine bankers were confined to the old and new market-places, where alone they were allowed to transact business: before the door was placed a bench, and a table covered with carpet, on which stood their money-bags and account-book for the daily transactions of trade."

62. Simifonte, a village near Certaldo. It was captured by the Florentines, and made part of their territory, in 1202.

64. In the valley of the Ombrone, east of Pistoia, are still to be seen the ruins of Montemurlo, once owned by the Counts Guidi, and by them sold to the Florentines in 1203, because they could not defend it against the Pistoians.

65. The Pivier d' Acone, or parish of Acone, is in the Val di Sieve, or Valley of the Sieve, one of the affluents of the Arno. Here the powerful family of the Cerchi had their castle of Monte di Croce, which was taken and destroyed by the Florentines in 1053, and the Cerchi and others came to live in Florence, where they became the leaders of the Parte Bianca. See Inf. VI. Note 65.

66. The Buondelmonti were a wealthy and powerful family of Valdigrieve, or Valley of the Grieve, which, like the Sieve, is an affluent of the Arno. They too, like the Cerchi, came to Florence, when their lands were taken by the Florentines, and were in a certain sense the cause of Guelf and Ghibelline quarrels in the city. See Inf. X. Note 51.

70. The downfall of a great city is more swift and terrible than that of a smaller one; or, as Venturi interprets, "The size of the body and greater robustness of strength in a city and state are not helpful, but injurious to their preservation, unless men live in peace and without the blindness of the passions, and Florence, more poor and humble, would have flourished longer."

Perhaps the best commentary of all is that contained in the two lines of Chaucer's Troilus and Cresseide, II. 1385,- aptly quoted by Mr. Cary:

"For swifter course cometh thing that is of wight,

Whan it descendeth, than done thinges light.”

72. In this line we have in brief Dante's political faith, which is given in detail in his treatise De Monarchia. See the article "Dante's Creed," among the Illustrations of Vol. II.

73. Luni, an old Etruscan city in the Lunigiana; and Urbisaglia, a Roman city in the Marca d' Ancona.

75. Chiusi is in the Sienese territory, and Sinigaglia on the Adriatic, east of Rome. This latter place has somewhat revived since Dante's time.

76. Boccaccio seems to have caught

something of the spirit of this canto, when, lamenting the desolation of Florence by the plague in 1348, he says in the Introduction to the Decamerone : "How many vast palaces, how many beautiful houses, how many noble dwellings, aforetime filled with lords and ladies and trains of servants, were now untenanted even by the lowest menial ! How many memorable families, how many ample heritages, how many renowned possessions, were left without an heir! How many valiant men, how many beautiful women, how many gentle youths, breakfasted in the morning. with their relatives, companions, and friends, and, when the evening came, supped with their ancestors in the other world!"

78. Lowell, To the Past:"Still as a city buried 'neath the sea,

Thy courts and femples stand;
Idle as forms on wind-waved tapestry
Of saints and heroes grand,

Thy phantasms grope and shiver,
Or watch the loose shores crumbling silently
Into Time's gnawing river."

"Our fathers," says Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial, V., " find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. . . . . Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up the first