magisterial duty, he tore this friend from his side though not from his heart, and pronounced on him the sentence of banishment, the weight of which he must even then have known so well. It speaks to the eternal honour of Guido, as well as Dante, that this deed appears not to have thrown so much as a shadow upon the friendship of the two men.[12]

Had Dante's successors in office dealt with firmness and integrity equal to his own, all might have been well; but a vacillating and equivocal policy soon opened the door to suspicions and recriminations, Florence ceased to steer her own course and permitted foreign interference with her affairs, while the Pope, with intentions that may have been good but with a policy which proved utterly disastrous, furthered the intervention of the French Prince Charles of Valois. It was a critical moment. An embassy to the Papal Court was essential, and a firm hand must meanwhile hold the reins at Florence. 'If I go, who shall stay? If I stay, who shall go?' Dante is reported to have said; and though the saying is probably apocryphal, yet it points out happily enough the true position of affairs. Dante was now no longer the chief magistrate of his city, but he was in fact, though not in name, the one man of Florence, the one man of Italy.

Finally he resolved to go to Rome. But the blindness or corruption of the Papal Court was invincible; and while Dante was still toiling at his hopeless task, Charles of Valois entered Florence with his troops, soon to realise the worst suspicions of those who had opposed his intervention. Nominally a restorer of tranquillity, he stirred up all the worst and most lawless passions of the Florentines; and while Dante was serving his country at Rome, the unjust and cruel sentence of banishment was launched against him, his property was confiscated and seized, a few months afterwards he was sentenced to be burned to death should he ever fall into the power of the Florentines, and, not content with all this, his enemies heaped upon his name the foulest calumnies of embezzlement and malversation—calumnies which I suppose no creature from that hour to this has ever for one moment believed, but which could not fail to make the envenomed wound strike deeper into Dante's heart.

So now he must leave 'all things most dear—this the first arrow shot from exile's bow,' in poverty and dependence his proud spirit must learn 'how salt a taste cleaves to a patron's bread, how hard a path to tread a patron's stair;' and, above all, his unsullied purity and patriotism must find itself forced into constant association or even alliance with selfish and personal ambition, or with tyranny, meanness, and duplicity.[13] How that great soul bore itself amid all these miseries, what it learnt from them, where it sought and found a refuge from them, we shall see when we take up again the broken thread which we must drop to-day.

II

DANTE'S LIFE AND PRINCIPLES

II. IN EXILE

A rapid sketch of the most decisive events and the leading motives of the life of Dante Alighieri has brought us to the eventful period of his Priorate in 1300 and his banishment in 1302. His unsuccessful efforts to carry out a firm and statesmanlike policy in Florence, with the wreck of his own fortunes consequent upon their failure, may be regarded as the occasion if not the cause of his conceiving his greatest work, the 'Divine Comedy.'

Nineteen years elapsed between Dante's exile and his death, and both tradition and internal evidence indicate that the main strength of his life was poured during the whole of this