The spirit says this in Latin, as if to veil the compliment to the poet in “the obscurity of a learned language.”  And in truth it is a little strong.]

[Footnote 14: 

  “Che dentro a gli occhi suoi ardeva un riso
  Tal, ch’ io pensai co’ miei toccar lo fondo
  De la mia grazia e del mio Paradiso.”

That is, says Lombardi, “I thought my eyes could not possibly be more favoured and imparadised” (Pensai che non potessero gli occhi miei essere graziati ed imparadisati maggiormente)—­Variorum edition of Dante, Padua, 1822, vol. iii. p. 373.]

[Footnote 15:  Here ensues the famous description of those earlier times in Florence, which Dante eulogises at the expense of his own.  See the original passage, with another version, in the Appendix.]

[Footnote 16:  Bellincion Berti was a noble Florentine, of the house of the Ravignani.  Cianghella is said to have been an abandoned woman, of manners as shameless as her morals.  Lapo Salterelli, one of the co-exiles of Dante, and specially hated by him, was a personage who appears to have exhibited the rare combination of judge and fop.  An old commentator, in recording his attention to his hair, seems to intimate that Dante alludes to it in contrasting him with Cincinnatus.  If so, Lapo might have reminded the poet of what Cicero says of his beloved Caesar;—­that he once saw him scratching the top of his head with the tip of his finger, that he might not discompose the locks.]

[Footnote 17: 

  “Chi ei si furo, e onde venner quivi,
  Piu e tacer che ragionare onesto.”

Some think Dante was ashamed to speak of these ancestors, from the lowness of their origin; others that he did not choose to make them a boast, for the height of it.  I suspect, with Lombardi, from his general character, and from the willingness he has avowed to make such boasts (see the opening of canto xvi., Paradise, in the original), that while he claimed for them a descent from the Romans (see Inferno, canto xv. 73, &c.), he knew them to be] poor in fortune, perhaps of humble condition.  What follows, in the text of our abstract, about the purity of the old Florentine blood, even in the veins of the humblest mechanic, may seem to intimate some corroboration of this; and is a curious specimen of republican pride and scorn.  This horror of one’s neighbours is neither good Christianity, nor surely any very good omen of that Italian union, of which “Young Italy” wishes to think Dante such a harbinger.

All this too, observe, is said in the presence of a vision of Christ on the Cross!]

[Footnote 18:  The Column, Verrey (vair, variegated, checkered with argent and azure), and the Balls or (Palle d’oro), were arms of old families.  I do not trouble the reader with notes upon mere family-names, of which nothing else is recorded.]

[Footnote 19:  An allusion, apparently acquiescent, to the superstitious popular opinion that the peace of Florence was bound up with the statue of Mars on the old bridge, at the base of which Buondelmonte was slain.