This letter has been adduced as an evidence of Dante’s poem having transpired during his lifetime:  a thing which, in the teeth of Boccaccio’s statement to that effect, and indeed the poet’s own testimony[18], Foscolo holds to be so impossible, that he turns the evidence against the letter.  He thinks, that if such bitter invectives had been circulated, a hundred daggers would have been sheathed in the bosom of the exasperating poet[19].  But I cannot help being of opinion, with some writer whom I am unable at present to call to mind (Schlegel, I think), that the strong critical reaction of modern times in favour of Dante’s genius has tended to exaggerate the idea conceived of him in relation to his own.  That he was of importance, and bitterly hated in his native city, was a distinction he shared with other partisans who have obtained no celebrity, though his poetry, no doubt, must have increased the bitterness; that his genius also became more and more felt out of the city, by the few individuals capable of estimating a man of letters in those semi-barbarous times, may be regarded as certain; but that busy politicians in general, war-making statesmen, and princes constantly occupied in fighting for their existence with one another, were at all alive either to his merits or his invectives, or would have regarded him as anything but a poor wandering scholar, solacing his foolish interference in the politics of this world with the old clerical threats against his enemies in another, will hardly, I think, be doubted by any one who reflects on the difference between a fame accumulated by ages, and the living poverty that is obliged to seek its bread.  A writer on a monkish subject may have acquired fame with monks, and even with a few distinguished persons, and yet have been little known, and less cared for, out of the pale of that very private literary public, which was almost exclusively their own.  When we read, now-a-days, of the great poet’s being so politely received by Can Grande, lord of Verona, and sitting at his princely table, we are apt to fancy that nothing but his great poetry procured him the reception, and that nobody present competed with him in the eyes of his host.  But, to say nothing of the different kinds of retainers that could sit at a prince’s table in those days, Can, who was more ostentatious than delicate in his munificence, kept a sort of caravansera for clever exiles, whom he distributed into lodgings classified according to their pursuits;[20] and Dante only shared his bounty with the rest, till the more delicate poet could no longer endure either the buffoonery of his companions, or the amusement derived from it by the master.  On one occasion, his platter is slily heaped with their bones, which provokes him to call them dogs, as having none to shew for their own.  Another time, Can Grande asks him how it is that his companions give more pleasure at court than himself; to which he answers, “Because like loves like.”  He then leaves the court, and his disgusted superiority is no doubt regarded as a pedantic assumption.