Among My Books, Second Series | Page 2

great Museum of Florence stand statues of
her illustrious dead, her poets, painters, sculptors, architects, inventors,
and statesmen; and as the traveller feels the ennobling lift of such

society, and reads the names or recognizes the features familiar to him
as his own threshold, he is startled to find Fame as commonplace here
as Notoriety everywhere else, and that this fifth-rate city should have
the privilege thus to commemorate so many famous men her sons,
whose claim to pre-eminence the whole world would concede. Among
them is one figure before which every scholar, every man who has been
touched by the tragedy of life, lingers with reverential pity. The
haggard cheeks, the lips clamped together in unfaltering resolve, the
scars of lifelong battle, and the brow whose sharp outline seems the
monument of final victory,-- this, at least, is a face that needs no name
beneath it. This is he who among literary fames finds only two that for
growth and immutability can parallel his own. The suffrages of highest
authority would now place him second in that company where he with
proud humility took the sixth place.[4]
Dante (Durante, by contraction Dante) degli Alighieri was born at
Florence in 1265, probably during the month of May.[5] This is the
date given by Boccaccio, who is generally followed, though he makes a
blunder in saying, sedendo Urbano quarto nella cattedra di San Pietro,
for Urban died in October, 1264. Some, misled by an error in a few of
the early manuscript copies of the Divina Commedia, would have him
born five years earlier, in 1260. According to Arrivabene,[6] Sansovino
was the first to confirm Boccaccio's statement by the authority of the
poet himself, basing his argument on the first verse of the Inferno,--
"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita";
the average age of man having been declared by the Psalmist to be
seventy years, and the period of the poet's supposed vision being
unequivocally fixed at 1300.[7] Leonardo Aretino and Manetti add
their testimony to that of Boccaccio, and 1265 is now universally
assumed as the true date. Voltaire,[8] nevertheless, places the poet's
birth in 1260, and jauntily forgives Bayle (who, he says, _écrivait à
Rotterdam_ currente calamo _pour son libraire_) for having been right,
declaring that he esteems him neither more nor less for having made a
mistake of five years. Oddly enough, Voltaire adopts this alleged
blunder of five years on the next page in saying that Dante died at the
age of 56, though he still more oddly omits the undisputed date of his
death (1321), which would have shown Bayle to be right. The poet's
descent is said to have been derived from a younger son of the great

Roman family of the Frangipani, classed by the popular rhyme with the
Orsini and Colonna:--
"Colonna, Orsini, e Frangipani, Prendono oggi e pagano domani."
That his ancestors had been long established in Florence is an inference
from some expressions of the poet, and from their dwelling having
been situated in the more ancient part of the city. The most important
fact of the poet's genealogy is, that he was of mixed race, the Alighieri
being of Teutonic origin. Dante was born, as he himself tells us,[9]
when the sun was in the constellation Gemini, and it has been absurdly
inferred, from a passage in the Inferno,[10] that his horoscope was
drawn and a great destiny predicted for him by his teacher, Brunetto
Latini. The Ottimo Comento tells us that the Twins are the house of
Mercury, who induces in men the faculty of writing, science, and of
acquiring knowledge. This is worth mentioning as characteristic of the
age and of Dante himself, with whom the influence of the stars took the
place of the old notion of destiny.[11] It is supposed, from a passage in
Boccaccio's life of Dante, that Alighiero the father was still living when
the poet was nine years old. If so, he must have died soon after, for
Leonardo Aretino, who wrote with original documents before him, tells
us that Dante lost his father while yet a child. This circumstance may
have been not without influence in muscularizing his nature to that
character of self-reliance which shows itself so constantly and sharply
during his after-life. His tutor was Brunetto Latini, a very superior man
(for that age), says Aretino parenthetically. Like Alexander Gill, he is
now remembered only as the schoolmaster of a great poet, and that he
did his duty well may be inferred from Dante's speaking of him
gratefully as one who by times "taught him how man eternizes
himself." This, and what Villani says of his refining the Tuscan idiom
(for so we understand his _farli scorti in bene parlare_),[12] are to be
noted as of probable influence on the career