is to go?” [21] Neither did his pride make him tolerant of pride in others.  A neighbour applying for his intercession with a magistrate, who had summoned him for some offence, Dante, who disliked the man for riding in an overbearing manner along the streets (stretching out his legs as wide as he could, and hindering people from going by), did intercede with the magistrate, but it was in behalf of doubling the fine in consideration of the horsemanship.  The neighbour, who was a man of family, was so exasperated, that Sacchetti the novelist says it was the principal cause of Dante’s expatriation.  This will be considered the less improbable, if, as some suppose, the delinquent obtained possession of his derider’s confiscated property; but, at all events, nothing is more likely to have injured him.  The bitterest animosities are generally of a personal nature; and bitter indeed must have been those which condemned a man of official dignity and of genius to such a penalty as the stake.[22]

That the Florentines of old, like other half-Christianised people, were capable of any extremity against an opponent, burning included, was proved by the fates of Savonarola and others; and that Dante himself could admire the burners is evident from his eulogies and beatification of such men as Folco and St. Dominic.  The tragical as well as “fantastic tricks” which

  “Man, proud man,
  Drest in a little brief authority,”

plays with his energy and bad passions under the guise of duty, is among the most perplexing of those spectacles, which, according to a greater understanding than Dante’s, “make the angels weep.” (Dante, by the way, has introduced in his heaven no such angels as those; though he has plenty that scorn and denounce.) Lope de Vega, though a poet, was an officer of the Inquisition, and joined the famous Armada that was coming to thumb-screw and roast us into his views of Christian meekness.  Whether the author of the story of Paulo and Francesca could have carried the Dominican theories into practice, had he been the banisher instead of the banished, is a point that may happily be doubted; but at all events he revenged himself on his enemies after their own fashion; for he answered their decree of the stake by putting them into hell.

Dante entitled the saddest poem in the world a Comedy, because it was written in a middle style; though some, by a strange confusion of ideas, think the reason must have been because it “ended happily!” that is, because, beginning with hell (to some), it terminated with “heaven” (to others).  As well might they have said, that a morning’s work in the Inquisition ended happily, because, while people were being racked in the dungeons, the officers were making merry in the drawing-room.  For the much-injured epithet of “Divine,” Dante’s memory is not responsible.  He entitled his poem, arrogantly enough, yet still not with that impiety of arrogance, “The Comedy of Dante Alighieri,