A DANTE AND THE SCALIGERS. BY C. E TYRER. S in bright, lovely days of the Italian spring of last year I paced the medieval streets of beautiful Verona, my thoughts would often turn to an illustrious guest of the fair city on the Adige, who had paced those very streets near six hundred years ago. Of all the cities of Italy, none, save Florence-ungrateful Florence-Dante's birthplace and early home-the bello ovile, ov' io dormii agnello Nimico ai lupi, che gli danno guerra*— and Ravenna, where he died at the early age of fifty-six as the guest of the noble family of Polenta, are so closely associated with the name of the greatest of Italians as Verona. It is true that the city, as we see it now, bears in the main little resemblance to the city which Dante knew. The famous Arena, or Roman amphitheatre, then doubtless all overgrown with weeds and brushwood; the Roman bridge over the rushing Adige, only two of whose original arches remain, but which was then probably intact; one or two gateways of late Roman work; and a very few of the oldest churches and the oldest palaces, such as those whose venerable castellated forms still frown over the Piazza de' Signori, the erections of the earliest days of the medieval city, were probably the main *"Paradiso," xxv., 5-6. THE MANCHESTER QUARTERLY. No. LXVII., JULY, 1898. features in the city as it presents itself to our eyes, which also met the eyes of Dante. Yet does his spirit seem still to linger in Verona as in none other of the great cities of Italy; and his personality, together with that of his host and friend, Can Grande della Scala, still casts a spell upon the cultured stranger who treads its streets as a living and a mighty personality. The life of Dante falls into two natural divisions, the period from his birth in 1265 until 1302, while, in his own words, as above quoted, he still "slept a lamb" (though, perhaps, in strict truth, he was never very much of a lamb) in "the fair sheepfold" of Florence, a citizen, as he felt himself to be, of no mean city; and the long years of exile, from 1302 until his death in Ravenna in 1321. Florence, like so many more of the Italian republics of that period, was divided into two great hostile factions, headed by the great rival houses of Donati and Cerchi, the former championing the cause of the so-called Neri, the black or extreme Guelfs; the latter that of Bianchi, the white or moderate Guelfs:* for Florence had ever been a Guelf city-that is, it sympathised rather with the Pope than the Emperor in their mutual struggles for supremacy in Italy, and would, if need be, lend the former material assistance, looking in return for his favour and protection. Nevertheless, when Boniface VIII., whose aim was to make Tuscany a province of the Church, sent Charles of Valois, brother of Philip IV. of France to Florence, in *This strife of parties in Florence, which had such momentous results for Dante's after life, began, as such things often did in Italy, in a miserable family feud, imported in this case into Florence from Pistoja by the two hostile factions of the Pistojan family of Cancellieri, one of which called itself the White or Bianca faction, the other the Nera. + Dante has consigned both Philip the Fair of France and his brother Charles to what appears to be well-merited infamy in his great poem. Vide, among other passages, the prophecy of Hugh Capet in "Purgatorio," xx., 43-96, where Philip is called the "mala pianta" and the "nuovo Pilato," and Charles of Valois is said to come unarmed, save with "la lancia con la qual giostrò Guida "—that is, treachery. 1301, with the ostensible object of making peace between the two rival parties, the Bianchi, among whom was Dante, then a prominent citizen, having shortly before risen to one of the highest offices of the State, resolutely opposed his offers. He, however, succeeded in entering the city, the Neri flocked to his standard, and took advantage of his presence and that of his soldiers to have their revenge upon their enemies of the Bianca faction. The houses of the Bianchi were burnt, their goods confiscated, and they themselves driven out of the city, a formal decree of banishment being pronounced against their leaders, including Dante, who, in the first sentence issued against him (January 27, 1302) was formally accused of "baratteria," or peculation of the public money, during his tenure of office. The leaders of the Bianchi party, it appears, did not wait for the formal sentence of exile to be launched against them; and thus Dante left his beloved Florence, the city of his birth, of the studies and delights of his youth, of Beatrice, dead, but ever-living in the poet's soul, where he had married and where his wife and little ones tarried behind―left Florence, never again to enter its gates: To Heaven and Hell thy feet may win, For us, living both materially and spiritually under conditions so utterly different to those of a Florentine of the early Trecento, it is difficult, or rather it is impossible, to realise Dante's feeling as a "fuoruscito," an outcast, or to understand how to one of Dante's generation, and still more to one of Dante's temperament, exile meant the loss of everything, or almost everything, which was desirable upon earth. A modern Italian might, perhaps, realise it to a certain degree, for the sentiment of local patriotism is still immensely strong in Italy, much stronger, I think, |