brings back news of the people there.”  On which her companion observed—­“Very likely; don’t you see what a curly beard he has, and what a dark face? owing, I dare say, to the heat and smoke.”  He was evidently a passionate lover of painting and music—­is thought to have been less strict in his conduct with regard to the sex than might be supposed from his platonical aspirations—­(Boccaccio says, that even a goitre did not repel him from the pretty face of a mountaineer)—­could be very social when he was young, as may be gathered from the sonnet addressed to his friend Cavalcante about a party for a boat—­and though his poetry was so intense and weighty, the laudable minuteness of a biographer has informed us, that his hand-writing, besides being neat and precise, was of a long and particularly thin character:  “meagre” is his word.

There is a letter, said to be nearly coeval with his time, and to be written by the prior of a monastery to a celebrated Ghibelline leader, a friend of Dante’s, which, though hitherto accounted apocryphal by most, has such an air of truth, and contains an image of the poet in his exile so exceedingly like what we conceive of the man, that it is difficult not to believe it genuine, especially as the handwriting has lately been discovered to be that of Boccaccio.[16] At all events, I am sure the reader will not be sorry to have the substance of it.  The writer says, that he perceived one day a man coming into the monastery, whom none of its inmates knew.  He asked him what he wanted; but the stranger saying nothing, and continuing to gaze on the building as though contemplating its architecture, the question was put a second time; upon which, looking round on his interrogators, he answered, “Peace!” The prior, whose curiosity was strongly excited, took the stranger apart, and discovering who he was, shewed him all the attention becoming his fame; and then Dante took a little book out of his bosom, aid observing that perhaps the prior had not seen it, expressed a wish to leave it with his new friend as a memorial.  It was “a portion,” he said, “of his work.”  The prior received the volume with respect; and politely opening it at once, and fixing his eyes on the contents, in order, it would seem, to shew the interest he took in it, appeared suddenly to check some observation which they suggested.  Dante found that his reader was surprised at seeing the work written in the vulgar tongue instead of Latin.  He explained, that he wished to address himself to readers of all classes; and concluded with requesting the prior to add some notes, with the spirit of which he furnished him, and then forward it (transcribed, I presume, by the monks) to their common friend, the Ghibelline chieftain—­a commission, which, knowing the prior’s intimacy with that personage, appears to have been the main object of his coming to the place[17].