[Footnote 4:  Istorie Fiorentine, II. 43 (in Tutte le Opere, 4to, 1550).]

[Footnote 5:  The name has been varied into Allagheri, Aligieri, Alleghieri, Alligheri, Aligeri, with the accent generally on the third, but sometimes on the second syllable.  See Foscolo, Discorso sul Testo, p. 432.  He says, that in Verona, where descendants of the poet survive, they call it Aligeri.  But names, like other words, often wander so far from their source, that it is impossible to ascertain it.  Who would suppose that Pomfret came from Pontefract, or wig from parrucca?  Coats of arms, unless in very special instances, prove nothing but the whims of the heralds.

Those who like to hear of anything in connexion with Dante or his name, may find something to stir their fancies in the following grim significations of the word in the dictionaries: 

“Dante, a kind of great wild beast in Africa, that hath a very hard skin.”—­Florio’s Dictionary, edited by Torreggiano.

“Dante, an animal called otherwise the Great Beast.”—­Vocabolario della Crusca, Compendiato, Ven. 1729.]

[Footnote 6:  See the passage in “Hell,” where Virgil, to express his enthusiastic approbation of the scorn and cruelty which Dante chews to one of the condemned, embraces and kisses him for a right “disdainful soul,” and blesses the “mother that bore him.”]

[Footnote 7:  Opere minori, vol iii 12.  Flor. 1839, pp. 292 &c.]

[Footnote 8:  “Beatrix quitta la terre dans tout l’eclat de la jeunesse et de la virginite.”  See the work as above entitled, Paris, 1840, p. 60.  The words in Latin, as quoted from the will by the critic alluded to in the Foreign Quarterly Review (No._ 65, art. Dante Allighieri), are, “Bici filiae suae et uxori D. (Domini) Simonis de Bardis.”  “Bici” is the Latin dative case of Bice, the abbreviation of Beatrice.  This employment, by the way, of an abbreviated name in a will, may seem to go counter to the deductions respecting the name of Dante.  And it may really do so.  Yet a will is not an epitaph, nor the address of a beatified spirit; neither is equal familiarity perhaps implied, as a matter of course, in the abbreviated names of male and female.]

[Footnote 9:  Vita Nuova. ut sup. p. 343]

[Footnote 10:  Vita Nuova, p. 345.]

[Footnote 11:  In the article on Dante, in the Foreign Quarterly Review, (ut supra), the exordium of which made me hope that the eloquent and assumption-denouncing writer was going to supply a good final account of his author, equally satisfactory for its feeling and its facts, but which ended in little better than the customary gratuitousness of wholesale panegyric, I was surprised to find the union with Gemma Donati characterised as “calm and cold,—­rather the accomplishment of a social