full pale,
  In four small faces mine own face I saw. 
  Oh, then both hands for misery did I gnaw;
  And they, thinking I did it, being mad
  For food, said, ’Father, we should be less sad
  If you would feed on us.  Children, they say,
  Are their own father’s flesh.  Starve not to-day.’ 
  Thenceforth they saw me shake not, hand nor foot. 
  That day, and next, we all continued mute. 
  O thou hard Earth!—­why opened’st thou not? 
  Next day (it was the fourth in our sad lot)
  My Gaddo stretched him at my feet, and cried,
  ‘Dear father, won’t you help me?’ and he died. 
  And surely as thou seest me here undone,
  I saw my whole three children, one by one,
  Between the fifth day and the sixth, all die. 
  I became blind; and in my misery
  Went groping for them, as I knelt and crawl’d
  About the room; and for three days I call’d
  Upon their names, as though they could speak too,
  Till famine did what grief had fail’d to do.”

  Having spoke thus, he seiz’d with fiery eyes
  That wretch again, his feast and sacrifice,
  And fasten’d on the skull, over a groan,
  With teeth as strong as mastiff’s on a bone. 
  Ah, Pisa! thou that shame and scandal be
  To the sweet land that speaks the tongue of Si.[1]

  Since Florence spareth thy vile neck the yoke,
  Would that the very isles would rise, and choke
  Thy river, and drown every soul within
  Thy loathsome walls.  What if this Ugolin
  Did play the traitor, and give up (for so
  The rumour runs) thy castles to the foe,
  Thou hadst no right to put to rack like this
  His children.  Childhood innocency is. 
  But that same innocence, and that man’s name,
  Have damn’d thee, Pisa, to a Theban fame?[2]

* * * * *

REAL STORY OF UGOLINO,

AND CHAUCER’S FEELING RESPECTING THE POEM.

Chaucer has told the greater part of this story beautifully in his “Canterbury Tales;” but he had not the heart to finish it.  He refers for the conclusion to his original, hight “Dant,” the “grete poete of Itaille;” adding, that Dante will not fail his readers a single word—­that is to say, not an atom of the cruelty.

Our great gentle-hearted countryman, who tells Fortune that it was

  “great cruelty
  Such birdes for to put in such a cage,”

adds a touch of pathos in the behaviour of one of the children, which Dante does not seem to have thought of: 

  “There day by day this child began to cry,
  Till in his father’s barme (lap) adown he lay;
  And said, ‘Farewell, father, I muste die,’
  And kiss’d his father, and died the same day.”