of Italy.  He was not conversant with art, for the great sculptors and painters had not then arisen.  The age was still dark; the mariner’s compass had not been invented, chimneys had not been introduced, the comforts of life were few.  Dames of highest rank still spent their days over the distaff or in combing flax.  There were no grand structures but cathedral churches.  Life was laborious, dismal, and turbulent.  Law and order did not reign in cities or villages.  The poor were oppressed by nobles.  Commerce was small and manufactures scarce.  Men lived in dreary houses, without luxuries, on coarse bread and fruit and vegetables.  The crusades had not come to an end.  It was the age of bad popes and quarrelsome nobles, and lazy monks and haughty bishops, and ignorant people, steeped in gloomy superstitions, two hundred years before America was discovered, and two hundred and fifty years before Michael Angelo erected the dome of St. Peter’s.

But there was faith in the world, and rough virtues, sincerity, and earnestness of character, though life was dismal.  Men believed in immortality and in expiation for sin.  The rising universities had gifted scholars whose abstruse speculations have never been rivalled for acuteness and severity of logic.  There were bards and minstrels, and chivalric knights and tournaments and tilts, and village fetes and hospitable convents and gentle ladies,—­gentle and lovely even in all states of civilization, winning by their graces and inspiring men to deeds of heroism and gallantry.

In one of those domestic revolutions which were so common in Italy Dante was banished, and his property was confiscated; and he at the age of thirty-five, about the year 1300, when Giotto was painting portraits, was sent forth a wanderer and an exile, now poor and unimportant, to eat the bread of strangers and climb other people’s stairs; and so obnoxious was he to the dominant party in his native city for his bitter spirit, that he was destined never to return to his home and friends.  His ancestors, boasting of Roman descent, belonged to the patriotic party,—­the Guelphs, who had the ascendency in his early years,—­that party which defended the claims of the Popes against the Emperors of Germany.  But this party had its divisions and rival families,—­those that sided with the old feudal nobles who had once ruled the city, and the new mercantile families that surpassed them in wealth and popular favor.  So, expelled by a fraction of his own party that had gained power, Dante went over to the Ghibellines, and became an adherent of imperial authority until he died.