cian; as perfect in prose and verse as he was in public speaking a most noble orator; in rhyming excellent, with the most polished and beautiful style that ever appeared in our language up to this time or since. He wrote in his youth the book of The Early Life of Love, and afterwards when in exile made twenty moral and amorous canzonets very excellent, and among other things three noble epistles: one he sent to the Florentine government, complaining of his undeserved exile; another to the Emperor Henry when he was at the siege of Brescia, reprehending him for his delay, and almost prophesying; the third to the Italian cardinals during the vacancy after the death of Pope Clement, urging them to agree in electing an Italian Pope; all in Latin, with noble precepts and excellent sentences and authorities, which were much commended by the wise and learned. And he wrote the Commedia, where, in polished verse and with great and subtile arguments, moral, natural, astrological, philosophical, and theological, with new and beautiful figures, similes, and poetical graces, he composed and treated in a hundred chapters or cantos of the exist ence of hell, purgatory, and paradise; so loftily as may be said of it, that whoever is of subtile intellect may by his said treatise perceive and understand. He was well pleased in this poem to blame and cry out, in the manner of poets, in some places perhaps more than he ought to have done; but it may be that his exile made him do so. He also wrote the Monarchia, where he treats of the office of popes and emperors. And he began a comment on fourteen of the abovenamed moral canzonets in the vulgar tongue, which in consequence of his death is found imperfect except on

three, which, to judge from what is seen, would have proved a lofty, beautiful, subtile, and most important work; because it is equally ornamented with noble opinions and fine philosophical and astrological reasoning. Besides these he composed a little book which he entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia, of which he promised to make four books, but only two are to be found, perhaps in consequence of his early death; where, in powerful and elegant Latin and good reasoning, he rejects all the vulgar tongues of Italy. This Dante, from his knowledge, was somewhat presumptuous, harsh, and disdainful, like an ungracious philosopher; he scarcely deigned to converse with laymen; but for his other virtues, science, and worth as a citizen, it seems but reasonable to give him perpetual remembrance in this our chronicle; nevertheless, his noble works, left to us in writing, bear true testimony of him, and honorable fame to our city.1

1 Vide pp. 95 ff.

I

BOCCACCIO'S VITA DI DANTE

DR. EDWARD MOORE,1 than whom there is not a more careful and judicious Dante scholar, discusses as follows the reliability of Boccaccio's account of Dante :

"It is needless to point out the peculiar advantages possessed by Boccaccio as a biographer of the poet. He was born during Dante's lifetime,

ancorche fosse tardi,

too late indeed for personal knowledge of him, though not too late to have intercourse and acquaintance with those who knew him familiarly; at a time consequently when in living memories there existed a store of anecdotes and personal reminiscences of the man as he lived and moved among his fellows, of the aspect he wore to them, of the impression he made upon them. Boccaccio had also another qualification, that of

lungo studio e grande amore,

in respect of the poet and his works. When the Florentines in 1373 determined to establish a public Lectureship on Dante, Boccaccio was appointed to the office, and delivered his first lecture on October 12th in that year, in the Church of San Stefano, near the Ponte Vecchio. His Lectures took the form of a minute and elaborate Commentary, which is preserved to us as a fragment only, since his work was unhappily interrupted by death in December, 1375, when his Commentary had reached the 17th line of the 17th Canto of the Inferno. The language of this Commentary

1 Dante and His Early Biographers. Edward Moore, D. D. Rivingtons, London, 1890. (By permission.)

is (as one might say) saturated with Dantesque phraseology; the frequency of apparently unconscious quotations of phrases and expressions indicates a very thorough acquaintance with all parts of the Divina Commedia. We know him to have had personal communication with one at least of the children of Dante, his daughter Beatrice, a nun in the convent of San Stefano dell' Uliva at Ravenna, for he was commissioned by a decree of the citizens of Florence (or, to speak more precisely, the company of Or San Michelo), in the year 1350, to convey to her a subsidy of ten florins of gold. Other personal sources of information will be mentioned later."

Having exhaustively considered the two works, each claiming to be Boccaccio's Life of Dante, which have come down to us, and having concluded that the one usually received is the genuine one, Dr. Moore proceeds:

"Now the credibility of such a work depends on two things: (1) the opportunities for information possessed by its author; and (2) the character of the author himself. We will take them in order, and as to the first we further note that the opportunities for information are of two kinds, general and special.

"In a general sense, any one whatever living either as a contemporary with, or very soon after, the events or persons about which or whom he writes, has obviously opportunities both for gathering, and also for testing, information such as no later author can possess. This qualification of course Boccaccio, as we have already observed, possessed in a preeminent degree. But he had also special qualifications from his actual intercourse with friends and relations of the poet himself. Not only was he brought into contact, as we have seen, with Dante's own daughter Beatrice, but there are three other persons mentioned by Boccaccio by name, either relations or intimate friends of Dante himself, from whom he expressly says that he received definite information. First we have Pier Giardino of Ravenna, who, as we read near the beginning of Boccaccio's Commentary, was

one of the most intimate and devoted friends whom Dante had in Ravenna. Now Pier Giardino himself informed Boccaccio of Dante's age as it was stated to him by Dante when he lay upon his deathbed. Pier is again mentioned in the Vita (c. xlv.), where he is described as lungamente stato discepolo di Dante, as the authority for Boccaccio's statement of the strange loss and recovery of the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso. Pier Giardino had no doubt the incident well impressed on his memory ·

chiavata in mezzo della testa

Con maggior chiovi, che d' altrui sermone,

by the fact that he was knocked up out of his bed one night before daybreak by Dante's son Jacopo, who came to tell him of the mysterious vision which he had had during the night in reference to the lost cantos. Now recent researches have discovered abundant contemporary documents proving the presence of Pier Giardino at Ravenna early in the fourteenth century, and notably in the years 1320, 1328, 1346, etc. (See Guerrini e Ricci, Studi e Polemiche Dantesche.) Further, beside other documentary evidence of the presence of Boccaccio also at Ravenna, we have an extract from the Storie Ravennati of Rossi, given by Guerrini, etc., pp. 38, 39: Joannes Boccatius . . . frequenter consueverat urbem hanc, ubi Boccatiorum familia Ravennas erat.

"Next we have Dante's nephew, son of his sister, by name Andrea Poggi. In the Commentary on Inf. viii. 1, he is mentioned as having narrated to Boccaccio, with whom he was intimate (dimestico divenuto), the story of the loss and recovery of Inf. cantos i.-vii., claiming to have been himself the person who discovered them. Boccaccio there describes this Andrea Poggi as marvelously resembling Dante in face and stature, and moreover that he walked as though he were slightly humpbacked, as Dante himself is said to have done (come Dante si dice che faceva). After testifying to his straightforward and honest character, Boccaccio states that he knew him intimately, and that he derived much information from him respecting Dante's ways and habits (costumi e modi).