From lowliness or tempted thence in vain, In their own souls sustain a harder proof,

The inner war of passions deep and fierce? Florence! when thy harsh sentence razed my roof, I loved thee; but the vengeance of my verse, The hate of injuries which every year Makes greater, and accumulates my curse, Shall live, outliving all thou holdest dear,

Thy pride, thy wealth, thy freedom, and even that,
The most infernal of all evils here,
The sway of petty tyrants in a state;

For such sway is not limited to kings,
And demagogues yield to them but in date
As swept off sooner; in all deadly things

Which make men hate themselves, and one another,
In discord, cowardice, cruelty, all that springs
From Death, the Sin-born's incest with his mother,
In rank oppression in its rudest shape,

The faction Chief is but the Sultan's brother,
And the worst despot's far less buman ape:
Florence! when this lone spirit, which so long
Yearn'd, as the captive toiling at escape,
To fly back to thee in despite of wrong,
An exile saddest of all prisoners,

Who has the whole world for a dungeon strong,
Seas, mountains, and the horizon's verge for bars,
Which shut him from the sole small spot of earth
Where-whatsoe'er his fate-he still were hers,
His country's, and might die where he had birth-
Florence! when this lone spirit shall return
To kindred spirits, thou wilt feel my worth,
And seek to honour with an empty urn
The ashes thou shalt ne'er obtain-Alas!

"What have I done to thee, my people?"* Stern Are all thy dealings, but in this they pass

The limits of man's common malice, for

All that a citizen could be I was;

Raised by thy will, all thine in peace or war,

And for this thou hast warr'd with me.-'Tis done: I may not overleap the eternal bar Built up between us, and will die alone, Beholding, with the dark eye of a seer, The evil days to gifted souls foreshown, Foretelling them to those who will not hear, As in the old time, till the hour be come

When Truth shall strike their eyes through many a tear,

And make them own the Prophet in his tomb.

"E scrisse piu volte non solamente a particulari citadin del reggimento, ma ancora al popolo, e intra l'altre un Epistola assai lunga che comincia:-Popule mi quidf eci tibi?"

Vita di Dante scritta da Lionardo Aretino.

"THE Emperor Nepos was acknowledged by the Senate, by "the Italians, and by the Provincials of Gaul; his moral virtues, "and military talents, were loudly celebrated; and those who "derived any private benefit from his government announced in "prophetic strains the restoration of public felicity.

"By this shameful abdication, he protracted his life a few years, " in a very ambiguous state, between an Emperor and an Exile .till

Gibbon's Decline and Fall, vol. 6, p. 220.