his Römische Geschichte, with insolence; Merivale, in his History of the Romans under the Empire, with a fairness rather severe than merciful; Forsyth, in his Life of Cicero, with loving candor; Boissier, in his Ciceron et Ses Amis, with affectionate justice. This work of Boissier is the most interesting, emotional, and just of the whole. One lays it down with the feeling that Cicero - the brilliant, brave, boastful, shrinking, timid, vain, garrulous, learned, wise, unhappy, tender, pious, immortal Cicero deserves to be blamed somewhat, pitied a little, excused a great deal, admired more, praised and loved most of all, by the world of his fascinated and grateful readers. BOETHIUS. THE author of the "Consolation of Philosophy," Boethius, has a place singularly by himself among men, in the fame of his beautiful work. After holding at the court of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, the offices of Consul and Senator, with brilliant ability, he fell into undeserved disfavor with his sovereign. His unflinching honesty, together with his conspicuous kindness, courage, and watchfulness, brought a pack of informers and other base men against him. A sentence of confiscation and death was passed on him unheard. During his imprisonment he wrote that precious treatise on the solaces of wisdom, which has strengthened many a kindred sufferer from injustice since. He underwent a horrible death, being first tortured by a cord drawn around his head till the eyes burst from their sockets, and then beaten with clubs till he expired. When we trace the lofty meditations with which he comforted himself in his prison, and compare his sweet, generous mind and heroic virtues with the brutal ferocity of the jealous mediocrities around him, a tragic loneliness associates itself with the figure of him presented by the historic imagination. DANTE. Dante AlighieRI is the most monarchic figure in literary history. Awe and Love now accompany the shade of the untamable Ghibelline on the journey of his fame, as he pictured Virgil guiding his steps through the other world. That stern, sad, worn face, made so well known to us by art, looks on the passing generations of men with a woful pity, masking the pain and want which are too proud to beg for sympathy, extorting, chiefly from the most royal souls, a royal tribute of wonder and affection. Some one has said that Dante was 66 a born solitary, a grand, impracticable solitary. He could not live with the Florentines; he could not live with Gemma Donati; he could not live with Can Grande della Scala." The truth in the remark is, perhaps, a little misleading. It is certainly not strange that an exile should be unable to live at home with the victorious party of his persecutors; that a man absorbed in an ideal world should ill agree with a prosaic and shrewish wife; or that the demeaning favors of a patron should gall a generous spirit. Dante was no separatist, either in theory or in native temper of soul, though he was lonely in experience and fate. The inward life was to him the only constant end; the ecstasy of the divine vision the only sufficing good. Memory, thought, and faith were his three cities of refuge. His intellect was too piercing, his disposition too earnest, his affections too sensitive and tenacious, his prejudices and resentments too vehement and implacable, for satisfactory intercourse with others to be easy. "He delighted," Boccaccio says, "in being solitary and apart from the world, that his contemplations might not be interrupted. And when he was in company, if he had taken up any subject of meditation that pleased him, he would make no reply to any question asked, until he had confirmed or rejected the fancy that haunted him." Benvenuto da Imola speaks of his having been seen to stand at a book-stall in Siena, studying a rare work, from matins till noon; so absorbed in it as to be unconscious of the passing of a bridal procession with music and lovepoems, such as he especially delighted in. Owing to the extraordinary scope, intensity, and pertinacity of his states of consciousness, he was both an exceedingly loving and magnanimous, and an exceedingly irascible and revengeful man. If he was sensitively exacting, he could also be regally self-sufficing. To such a nature fit society would be delicious, but hard to find; unfit society, easy to find, but insufferable; solitude, a natural refuge, not less medicinal than welcome. The different kinds of spiritual loneliness meet in a more striking combination in Dante than in almost any other man. He knew, in a distinguishing degree, the loneliness of individuality; for he had a most pronounced originality of character, all of whose peculiar features the circumstances of his age and life tended to exaggerate. Altogether, with his towering self-respect, his deep sense of his own prophetic office, his soft, proud, burning reveries, it would be hard to find a more intrinsically isolated personality. He knew the loneliness of genius, his mind being of a scale and altitude far aloof from those about him. Among the peaks of human greatness, the solitary cone of the intellect of Dante shoots highest into the sky, though several others touch a wider horizon and show a richer landscape. He knew the loneliness of love. The wondrous fervency and exaltation of his sacred passion for Beatrice, no one else could enter into: he could speak of it to no ordinary comrade. In his own words, "The first time I heard her voice, I was smitten with such delight that I broke away from the company I was in, like a drunken man, and retired within the solitude of my chamber to meditate upon her." He knew the loneliness of a passionate, idealizing grief. He says, "I was affected by such profound grief, that, rushing away from the crowd, I sought a lonely spot wherein to bathe the earth with my most bitter tears; and when, after a space, these tears were somewhat abated, betaking myself to my chamber where I could give vent to my passion unheard, I fell asleep, weeping like a beaten child." And again he says, Ashamed, I go apart from men, And call on Beatrice, "Art thou dead?" He knew the loneliness of an absorbing aim. The production of his immortal poem, in which heaven and earth were constrained to take a part, and which, he says, kept him lean many years, implies immense studies and toil. Such an exhaustive masterpiece is not more a result of inspiration than of unwearied touches of critical art. He knew the loneliness of exile. Banished by party hate, he always yearned after his dear Florence; upbraided her that she "treated worst those who loved her best"; and, in his very epitaph, called her the "of all, least-loving mother." He wandered in foreign lands, from place to place, almost literally begging his way, " unwillingly showing the wound of fortune," tasting the saltness of the bread eaten at other men's tables, and at last dying in a strange city. He knew the loneliness of schemes and dreams reaching far beyond his own time, embracing the unity and liberty of his country; over whose distraction and enslavement others slept in their sloth or revelled in their pleasures. And finally, he knew the loneliness of a transcendent religious faith, which his imagination converted into a vision ever recalling his inner eye from the gairish vanities of the world. Before Dante was driven out by his fellow-citizens, Beatrice had died; his best friend, Guido Cavalcanti, had died; and he had lost, by the plague, two boys, aged eight and twelve years. Carrying these scars, and another as dark, inflicted by the disappointment of his patriotic hopes, he went forth never to return. Although he awak ened interest everywhere, his tarryings were comparatively brief. He knew his own greatness. His unbending kingliness, his serious and persistent sincerity, unfitted him for intercourse either with vapid triflers in the crowd, or with haughty mediocrities in high places. God made him incapable of fawning, or playing a part. He must appear as he was, act as he felt, speak as he thought. It is obvious from his history that he profoundly attracted the superior men with whom he came in contact. This is not inconsistent with the fact that speedy breaches occurred between him and nearly all of them. He broke with some because they betrayed the cause of his country; with others, on account of personal incompatibilities. Who possessed fineness and tenaciousness of spiritual fibre, richness and energy of mental resources, sobriety and loftiness of imaginative contemplation, to act and react in unison with the soul of Dante Alighieri? He had a warm intimacy with the imposing and brilliant military adventurer, Uguccione della Faggiuola, and offered him the dedication of the "Inferno." There appears to have been a strong attachment between him and Giotto. One cannot look on the recovered portrait of Dante by Giotto, without feeling that it must have been drawn by a hand of love. Benvenuto da Imola relates, that one day, when Giotto was painting a chapel at Padua, the wondrous frescos which at this day make the traveller linger on them with a sweet pain, unwilling to tear himself away, Dante came in, and the painter took the poet home with him. When first banished, he was generously welcomed in Lunigiana by the Marquis Morello Malaspina. Before long, however, he went to enjoy the splendid hospitality of the young lord of Verona, Can Grande della Scalla. In a letter to Can Grande, dedicating the first cantos of the "Paradiso" to him, he says, "At first sight I became your most devoted friend." He lays down the proposition, that “unequals, as well as equals, may be bound by the sacred bond of friendship." In support of this, he gives several arguments; one of which is, that even the infinite inequality of God and man does not prevent friendship between them. The grandees at the court looked down on Dante from their titular elevation: he looked down on them from his intrinsic superiority. One day, Can Grande said to him, concerning a favorite buffoon, "How is it that this silly fellow can make himself loved by all, and that thou, who art said to be so wise, canst not?" Dante replied, "Because all creatures delight in their own resemblance." The offended poet departed. He paid a long visit to Fra Maricone in the convent of Santa Croce di Fonte Avellana, where he wrote much of his matchless poem. Later he found a pleasant refuge with his good friend, Bosone da Gubbio, in the castle of Colmollaro. But his last, kindest, most faithful patron and friend was the noble ruler of Ravenna, the high-souled and culti ΙΟ |