first publication of the Æneid, and down to the time when the revival of learning reopened the treasures of Greek literature to Western Europe, Virgil reigned in the Latin countries supreme and unchallenged over the domain of poetry and scholarship. Within two generations of his own lifetime, altars were raised to him, by enthusiastic disciples, as to a deity. When Christianity spread, his supposed prediction of Christ in one of the Eclogues endowed him with the character of a prophet; and a magic efficacy had already been attributed to verses taken from his works. Throughout the Middle Ages, his fame still grew as the supreme arbiter in every field of literature, and as the repositary of more than human knowledge, while fantastic legends clustered round his name as the great magician and necromancer. To Dante there must also have been a special fascination in the Imperial scope and sympathies of the Æneid; for Virgil is pre-eminently the poet of the Roman Empire. But we must not pause to follow out this subject here. Suffice it that Dante felt for Virgil a reverence so deep, an admiration so boundless, and an affection so glowing, that he became to him the very type of human wisdom and excellence, the first agent of his rescue from the maze of passion and error in which his life had been entangled.

But Beatrice, the loved and lost, was the symbol and the channel of a higher wisdom, a diviner grace. She it was round whose sweet memory gathered the noblest purposes and truest wisdom of the poet's life. If ever he suffered the intensity of his devotion to truth and virtue for a moment to relax; if ever, as he passed amongst luxurious courts, some siren voice soothed his cares with a moment of unworthy forgetfulness and ignoble ease; if ever he suffered meaner cares or projects to draw him aside so much as in thought from his great mission, then it was Beatrice's glorified image that recalled him in tears of bitter shame and penitence to the path of pain, of effort, and of glory. It was her love that had rescued him from the fatal path; Virgil was but her agent and emissary, and his mission was complete when he had led him to her. Human wisdom and virtue could guide him through Hell and Purgatory, could show him the misery of sin, and the need of purifying pain and fire, but it was only in Beatrice's presence that he could feel the utter hatefulness and shame of an unworthy life, could feel the blessedness of Heaven.[23]

Under the guidance of Virgil and Beatrice, then, Dante had seen Hell and Purgatory and Heaven. This had snatched his soul from death, had taught him, even in the midst of the moral and political chaos of his age, how to live and after what to strive. Could he show others what he himself had seen? Could he save them, as he was saved, from the meanness, from the blindness, from the delusions of the life they led? He could. Though it should be the toil of long and painful years, yet in the passionate conviction of his own experience he felt the power in him of making real to others what was so intensely real to him. But what did this involve? The truth if wholesome was yet hard. He had dear and honoured friends whose lives had been stained by unrepented sin, and whose souls he had seen in Hell. Was he to cry aloud to all the world that these loved ones were amongst the damned, instead of tenderly hiding their infirmities? Again, he was poor and an exile, he had lost 'all things most dear,' and was dependent for his very bread on the grace and favour of the great; yet if he told the world what he had seen, a storm of resentful hatred would crash upon him from every region of Italy. How would proud dames and lords brook to be told of their dead associates in sin and shame cursing their names from the very depths of Hell, and looking for their speedy advent there? How would pope and cardinal and monarch brook to be told by the powerless exile what he had heard from souls in Heaven, in Purgatory, and in Hell? E'en let them brook it as they might. His cry should be like the tempest that sweeps down upon the loftiest forest trees, but leaves the brushwood undisturbed. The mightiest in the land should hear his voice, and henceforth none should think that loftiness of place or birth could shield the criminal. He would tell in utter truth what he had seen. He knew that power was in him to brand the infamous with infamy that none could wash away, to rescue the fair memory of those the world had wrongfully condemned, to say what none but he dare say, in verse which none but he could forge, and bring all those who hearkened through Hell and Purgatory into Heaven.[24]

To deliver this message was the work of his life, the end to which all his studies were directed, from the time of his exile to that of his death. Hence his studious labours came to have a representative and vicarious character in his mind. He was proudly conscious that he lived and worked for mankind, and that his toil deserved the grateful recognition of his city and his country.

This trait of his character comes out with striking force in the noble letter which he wrote in answer to the proffered permission to return to his beloved Florence, but upon disgraceful conditions which he could not accept. The offer came when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb. Henry VII. was dead, Uguccione had lost his power. All hope of the exile's returning in triumph seemed at an end. Then came the offer of a pardon and recall, for which he had longed with all the passionate intensity of his nature. And yet it was but a mockery. It was a custom in Florence upon the Day of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of the city, to release certain malefactors from the public gaols on their performing set acts of contrition; and a decree was passed that all the political exiles might return to their home on St. John's Day in 1317 if they would pay a sum of money, walk in procession, with tapers in their hands and with other tokens of guilt and penitence, to the church, and there offer themselves as ransomed malefactors to the saint.

Many of the exiles accepted the terms, but Dante's proud and indignant refusal shows us a spirit unbroken by disappointment and disaster, scorning to purchase ease by degradation. 'Is this,' he cries to the friend who communicated to him the conditions upon which he might return, 'is this the glorious recall by which Dante Alighieri is summoned back to his country after well-nigh fifteen years of exile? Is this what innocence well known to all, is this what the heavy toil of unbroken study, has deserved? Far be it from him who walks as her familiar with Philosophy to stoop to the base grovelling of a soul of clay and suffer himself thus to be treated like a vile malefactor. Far be it from the preacher of justice, when suffering outrage, to pay the acknowledgment of fair desert to the outrageous.

'Not by this path can I return. But let a way be found that hurts not Dante's honour and fair fame, and I will tread it with no tardy feet. If no such road leads back to Florence, then will I never enter Florence more. What! can I not gaze, wherever I may be, upon the spectacle of sun and stars? Can I not ponder on the sweetest truths in any region under heaven, but I must first make myself base and vile before the people of the