had had no foes; or but few? Indeed I know
not. But were it lawful so to say, I would declare that he had surely
become a God upon the earth.

[Illustration: Casa Polentana]

"Dante then, having lost all hope of a return to Florence, though he
retained the longing for it, dwelt in Ravenna for a number of years,
under the protection of its gracious lord. And here by his teachings
he trained many scholars in poetry, especially in the vernacular,
which vernacular to my thinking he first exalted and brought into
repute amongst us Italians no otherwise than did Homer his amongst the
Greeks or Virgil his amongst the Latins. Before him, though it is
supposed that it had already been practised some short space of years,
yet was there none who by the numbering of the syllables and by the
consonance of the terminal parts had the feeling or the courage to
make it the instrument of any matter dealt with by the rules of art;
or rather it was only in the lightest of love poems that they
exercised themselves therein. But he showed by the effect that every
lofty matter may be treated in it; and made our vernacular glorious
above every other.

"But since his hour is assigned to every man, Dante when already in
the middle or thereabout of his fifty-sixth year fell sick and in
accordance with the Christian religion received every Sacrament of the
Church humbly, and devoutly, and reconciled himself with God by
contrition for everything, that, being but man, he had done against
His pleasure; and in the month of September in the year of Christ one
thousand three hundred and twenty-one, on the day whereon the
Exaltation of the Holy Cross is celebrated by the Church, not without
greatest grief on the part of the aforesaid Guido and generally all
the other Ravennese citizens, he rendered up to his Creator his
toil-worn spirit, the which I doubt not was received into the arms of
his most noble Beatrice, with whom, in the sight of Him who is the
supreme good, the miseries of this present life left behind, he now
lives most joyously in that life the felicity of which expects no end.

"The magnanimous cavalier placed the dead body of Dante, adorned with
poetic insignia, upon a funeral bier, and had it borne on the
shoulders of his most distinguished citizens to the place of the Minor
Friars in Ravenna, with such honour as he deemed worthy of such a
corpse And here, public lamentations as it were having followed him so
far, he had him placed in