ete poete
of Itaille;" adding, that Dante will not fail his readers a single
word--that is to say, not an atom of the cruelty.

Our great gentle-hearted countryman, who tells Fortune that it was

"great cruelty
Such birdes for to put in such a cage,"

adds a touch of pathos in the behaviour of one of the children, which
Dante does not seem to have thought of:

"There day by day this child began to cry,
Till in his father's barme (lap) adown he lay;
And said, 'Farewell, father, I muste die,'
And _kiss'd his father_, and died the same day."

It will be a relief, perhaps, instead of a disappointment, to the
readers of this appalling story, to hear that Dante's particulars of it
are as little to be relied on as those of the Paulo and Francesca. The
only facts known of Ugolino are, that he was an ambitious traitor, who
did actually deliver up the fortified places, as Dante acknowledges; and
that his rivals, infamous as he, or more infamous, prevailed against
him, and did shut him up and starve him and some of his family. But
the "little" children are an invention of the poet's, or probably his
belief, when he was a young man, and first heard the story; for some of
Ugolino's fellow-prisoners may have been youths, but others were grown
up--none so childish as he intimates; and they were not all his own
sons; some were his nephews.

And as to Archbishop Ruggieri, there is no proof whatever of his having
had any share in the business--hardly a ground of suspicion; so that
historians look upon him as an "ill-used gentleman." Dante, in all
probability, must have learnt the real circumstances of the case, as he
advanced in years; but if charity is bound to hope that he would have
altered the passage accordingly, had he revised his poem, it is forced
to admit that he left it unaltered, and that his "will and pleasure"
might have found means of reconciling the retention to his conscience.
Pride, unfortunately, includes the power to do things which it pretends
to be very foreign to its nature; and in proportion as detraction is
easy to it, retraction becomes insupportable.[3]

Rabelais, to shew his contempt for the knights of chivalry, has made
them galley-slaves in the next world, their business being to help
Charon row his boat over the river Styx, and their payment a piece of
mouldy bread and a fillip on the nose. Somebody should write a burlesque
of the enormities in Dante's poem, and invent some Rabelaesque