to clear his memory is that serious charge of embezzlement. On this subject all that can be said now is that his own protestations of innocence, and the trend and tenor of his writings, may well be set in the judicial scale against the weakness of human nature and the temptations and traditions of the office.

Nunc dimittis.

The words which Dante puts into the mouth of his ancestor Cacciaguida, "I came from martyrdom unto this peace," are applicable perhaps to the close of his own earthly life, passed at Ravenna. There, honoured by the sincere friendship of Guido Novello da Polenta, and holding possibly some high position in the college, he gave himself to the completion of his great work. The last act of his career was eminently worthy of him, being a mission to Venice on behalf of his patron, and in the cause of peace. His efforts were repulsed, and on his way home he was seized with an illness. He died at Ravenna, the 13th of September 1321, and was buried. in the chapel of the Madonna, hard by the Church of St Francis. His funeral lacked no element of distinction that could reasonably have been present"the habit of a poet and a great philosopher," a sorrowful train of doctors, and a valedictory oration pronounced by Guido da Polenta himself.

Dante's

From the gloom of Dante's life in the world we pass to the refulgency of that inner life of which he has traced for us the outlines in imperishable Trilogy. art. The Vita Nuova, of which I have already spoken, is the first part of what has been excellently termed a literary and psychological trilogy.

Dante's spiritual life exhibits three phases, and each phase is represented in his writings-more particularly, in the Vita Nuova, the Convivio, and the Commedia, severally. The credit of this discovery belongs primarily to Dionisi, but the analysis will always be associated with the name of an illustrious critic, Karl Witte, who not only adopted it, but, recognising its importance, developed and systematised it in his essays, Über Dante; Über das Missverständiss Dante's; and Dante's Trilogie.1 Those who espouse this doctrine consider that Dante, in relation to his inner experience, lived through three epochs which may be defined as the age of peace, the age of conflict, and the age of reconciliation. Already in the Vita Nuova we hear the ominous, but still distant, thunder of a "molta battaglia," but, as we have seen, the story ends with the benediction as of a calm and radiant sunset. Possibly this touch may have been added after the Convivio had been abandoned unfinished, and at the moment when the Commedia, typifying a complete change of view, was assuming definite shape in his mind. The Convivio or Convito is the memorial of the second or philosophising period to which Dante afterwards looked back with regret and disapproval. His recantation occurs in Canto xxx. of the Purgatorio, where Beatrice addresses the "pious substances" :—

"Some time did I sustain him with my look ;
Revealing unto him my youthful eyes,

I led him with me turned in the right way.

1 Dante Forschungen, vol. i. pp. 1-65, 141-182.

As soon as ever of my second age

I was upon the threshold and changed life,
Himself from me he took and gave to others.

And into ways untrue he turned his steps,
Pursuing the false images of good,
That never any promises fulfil," &c.1

The Convivio.

Neither here, however, nor in the Convivio 2 do we find evidence of an utter apostasy from the faith such as Witte does not scruple to attribute to him. Undue absorption by philosophy is probably what is meant. Boccaccio tells us that in his riper years Dante felt shame at having written the Vita Nuova; and it is perhaps to this shame that we owe the Convivio. Disgusted with the simplicity of his early work, Dante girded himself for an allegorical exposition of his poetry as more in harmony with his mature age. In other words, he quitted the lover to become the man of science, the philosopher. His method is to select certain of his lyrics and to make them serve as texts for learned dissertations on the manifold aspects of human knowledge or speculation. Originally he proposed to treat fourteen canzoni, but only three are actually introduced. Whether Dante projected a work on the scale that this would imply, may be doubted. It is more likely that, with the progress of the composition and the incessant flow of ideas, the need of fresh lyrical inspiration ceased to be felt.

The objective value of the Convivio is not large, and consists chiefly in the aid which it affords towards

1 Longfellow's tr.

2 To the English reader may be commended Mr Hillard's translation (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co.)

deciphering the more difficult passages of the Commedia, and especially the Paradiso. This, however, is only another way of saying that the Convivio is prized as a key to the mind of Dante—that Dante is the real subject. These abstract studies interest us, if they do interest us, as forming the cartilage of the mighty intellect which puts on flesh and blood in the Vita Nuova and the Commedia, whereas the Convivio is the articulated skeleton, or, if you will, the nervous system laid bare to view. Dante is a schoolman, an Aristotelian. The position of Aristotle in his eyes is sufficiently indicated by such phrases as "glorious philosopher to whom Nature revealed her secrets,"

master and guide of the human reason," and, in the Commedia, "master of those that know." His authority is rejected only when it conflicts with the doctrines of Christianity, as, for instance, in the theory of the Heavenly Intelligences.

What is nobility?

In the introductory lyric Dante discusses the nature of nobility or gentleness, and corrects "the false judgment of those who hold that the source of gentleness is riches." This was a vital principle of the entire school, beginning with its founder. Guinicelli's great "epoch-making" poem, to which Dante refers, illustrates the point of view in a pregnant antithesis:

"The sun strikes full upon the mud all day;

It remains vile, nor the sun's worth is less.
'By race I am gentle,' the proud man doth say;
He is the mud, the sun is gentleness." 1

1 Rossetti's tr.

N

To concede that an "uomo da niente," be he of the Uberti of Florence or the Visconti of Milan, may be gentle by right of birth, would make nonsense of philosophy. As Dante states it with epigrammatic felicity, "it is not the race that ennobles the individuals, but the individuals the race." He accounts for the difference between souls in conformity with the opinions of Aristotle and the Peripatetics. A generative virtue, proceeding from Heaven or residing in the combined elements, passes with the human seed into the womb. There the formative virtue, supplied by the soul of the begetter, prepares the organs for the celestial virtue, and the soul becomes quick. It then receives from the Mover of the Heavens the potential intellect, which renders it capable of appropriating all the universal forms as they exist in its Producer, in a measure depending on its nearness or otherwise to the First Intelligence. The potential intellect is a gift from God, a divine ray, and identical with nobility. It is bestowed only on certain elect souls of happy constitution, which are naturally adapted for its reception.

"For God doth grant it only to the soul
That in her person whole

He seeth stand; so that to sundry men
Draws nigh the seed of bliss immaculate,
God-planted in the soul well situate."

Dante betrays a special pride in this definition of nobility as the "seed of bliss," since it embraces the four causes of the Aristotelian philosophy — the material cause in the words "nell' anima ben posta";