ous learning,
gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities and ends of man.
But it was the factions of Florence which made Dante a great poet.

The connection of these feuds with Dante's poem has given to the
Middle-Age history of Italy an interest of which it is not undeserving
in itself, full as it is of curious exhibitions of character and
contrivance, but to which politically it cannot lay claim, amid the
social phenomena, so far grander in scale and purpose and more
felicitous in issue, of other western nations. It is remarkable for
keeping up an antique phase, which, in spite of modern arrangements, it
has not yet lost. It is a history of cities. In ancient history all that
is most memorable and instructive gathers round cities; civilization and
empire were concentrated within walls; and it baffled the ancient mind
to conceive how power should be possessed and wielded by numbers larger
than might be collected in a single market-place. The Roman Empire,
indeed, aimed at being one in its administration and law; and it was not
a nation nor were its provinces nations, yet everywhere but in Italy it
prepared them for becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts were
uniting and union was becoming organization--and neither geographical
remoteness nor unwieldiness of number nor local interests and
differences were untractable obstacles to that spirit of fusion which
was at once the ambition of the few and the instinct of the many; and
cities, even where most powerful, had become the centres of the
attracting and joining forces, knots in the political network--while
this was going on more or less happily throughout the rest of Europe, in
Italy the ancient classic idea lingered in its simplicity, its
narrowness and jealousy, wherever there was any political activity. The
history of Southern Italy, indeed, is mainly a foreign one--the history
of modern Rome merges in that of the papacy; but Northern Italy has a
history of its own, and that is a history of separate and independent
cities--points of reciprocal and indestructible repulsion, and within,
theatres of action where the blind tendencies and traditions of classes
and parties weighed little on the freedom of individual character, and
citizens could watch and measure and study one another with the
minuteness of private life.

Dante, like any other literary celebrity of the time, was not less from
the custom of the day than from his own purpose a public ma