his mission no good at all. When the official
interview took place Dante, if we may believe something of the
apocryphal "Letter of Dante to Guido da Polenta," began to address the
doge in Latin and was bidden to speak in Italian or to obtain an
interpreter. His mission was a failure and Venice, who in the person
of her doge did her best to show either her ignorance of the great
poet who did her the honour of crossing her Piazza or of her
philistine contempt of him, lives in the _Divine Comedy_ only as an
illustration of Hell.

"Thus we from bridge to bridge ...
Pass'd on, and to the summit reaching, stood
To view another gap, within the round
Of Malebolge, other bootless pangs.
Marvellous darkness shadow'd o'er the place.
In the Venetian arsenal as boils
Through wintry months tenacious pitch, to smear
Their unbound vessels ...
So not by force of fire but art divine
Boiled here a glutinous thick mass, that round
Limed all the shore."

On his way back to Ravenna by land, for the Venetians added to their
shame by refusing him the sea passage, he caught a fever in the
marshes and returned to Ravenna only to die: the mightiest of all
those--emperors and kings--who lie in that "_generale sepolcro di
santissimi corpi_."

That was in 1321; and with the death of Dante our interest in Ravenna
again becomes cold. Guido Novello soon fell, driven out of Ravenna,
never to return, by Ostasio who had assassinated Guide's brother the
archbishop-elect Rinaldo. Ostasio ruled with the title of vicar which
he received both from Lewis the Bavarian and from pope Benedict XII.
This vicious and cruel despot was succeeded by his equally cruel son
Bernardino. He ruled for fourteen years, 1345-1359, not, however,
without mishap, for his brothers conspired against him and flung him
into prison at Cervia. He contrived, however, to turn the tables upon
them and to hold them in the same dungeon where he himself had been
their prisoner. He was succeeded at last by Guido Lucio, a man of some
integrity; but he too was the victim of his family, his own sons
rising up against him in his old age and in 1389 flinging him into
prison where he died.

He was followed in the lordship of Ravenna by his son Ostasio. This
man died in 1431, that is to say, in the midst of all the confusion,
here in Romagna and the Marches, of the fifteenth century, when the
condottieri were one and all looking for thrones and such ambitions as
those o