ns which are
legitimately urged against volumes of selections.

[Footnote 1: The complex and miserable history of Ugolino and Nino we
have given only in its most essential portions. Even its connection
with one of the most terrible and widely known passages in the
_Inferno_ cannot make it other than dreary, sordid, and
unilluminating.]

* * * * *

The nature of the interest which the Dante student will find in these
selections will vary as he goes through the volume.

The early portions, up to the end of Book III., are interesting not so
much for the direct elucidation of special passages in Dante as for
the assistance they give us in realizing the atmosphere through which
he and his contemporaries regarded their own past; and their habitual
confusion of legend and history.

From Book IV. on into Book VIII. our interest centres more and more on
the specific contents of Villani's Chronicle. Here he becomes the best
of all commentators upon one phase of Dante's many-sided genius; for
he gives us the material upon which Dante's judgments are passed, and
enables us to know the men and see the events he judges as he himself
knew and saw them. Chapter after chapter reads like a continuous
commentary on _Purg._ vi. 127-151; and there is hardly a sentence that
does not lighten and is not lightened by some passage in the _Comedy_.
Readers who have been accustomed to weary themselves in attempts to
digest and remember historical notes (into which extracts from
Villani, torn from their native haunts, have been driven up for
instant slaughter, as in battue shooting) will find it a relief to
have the story of the battles and revolutions of Florence, as Dante
saw and felt it, continuously set before them--even though it be, for
the present, in the partial and therefore mutilated form of
"selections."

When we come to the later portions of Book VIII. and the first part
of Book IX. the interest again changes. To the events after 1300
Dante's chief work contains comparatively few and scattered allusions;
but as the direct connection with his writings becomes less marked the
connection with his biography becomes more intimate. As we study the
tangled period of Florentine politics that coincides with Dante's
active political life (about 1300 A.D.), the ill-concerted and feeble
attempts of the exiles to regain a footing in their city, and later on
the splendid but futile enterprise of Henry, we seem t