ur poor servant the
least, began to receive certain gifts of verses very clearly writ on
fair skins of parchment, which gave them a great pleasure and threw them
into a great amazement. For it was very plain that the writer of these
verses was one in whose ear the god Apollo whispered, was one that knew,
as it seemed, better than the best of us, how to wed the warmest
thoughts of the heart to the most exquisite music of flowing words.
These verses, that were for the most part sonnets and longer songs,
were all dedicated to the service of love and the praise of a nameless
lady, and they were all written in that common speech which such as I
talked to the men and women about me, so that there was no man nor woman
in the streets but could understand their meaning if once they heard
them spoken--a fact which I understand gave great grief to Messer
Brunetto Latini when some of these honey-sweet verses of the unknown
were laid before him.

To Messer Brunetto's eyes and to Messer Brunetto's ears and to Messer
Brunetto's understanding there was but one language in the world that
was fit for the utterances and the delectation of scholars, and that
language, of course, was the language which he wrote so well--the Latin
of old-time Rome. If a man must take the love-sickness, so Messer
Brunetto argued, and must needs express the perfidious folly in words,
what better vehicle could he have for his salacious fancy than the forms
and modes and moods which contented the amorous Ovidius, and the
sprightly Tibullus, and the hot-headed, hot-hearted Catullus, and the
tuneful Petronius, and so on, to much the same purpose, through a string
of ancient amorists? But we that were younger than Messer Brunetto, and
simpler, and certainly more ignorant, we found a great pleasure in these
verses that were so easy to understand as to their language, if their
meaning was sometimes a thought mystical and cryptic.

The fame of these verses spread widely, because no man of us that
received a copy kept the donation to himself, but made haste to place
abroad the message that had been sent to him. So that in a little while
all Florence that had any care for the Graces was murmuring these
verses, and wondering who it was that wrote them, and why it was that he
wrote. It seems to me strange now, looking back on all these matters
through the lapse of years, and through a mist of sad and happy
memories, that I was not wise enough to guess at once who the man