the cry is ‘Giotto.’  Thus, in song, a new Guido has deprived the first of his glory, and he perhaps is born who shall drive both out of the nest.[24] Fame is but a wind that changes about from all quarters.  What does glory amount to at best, that a man should prefer living and growing old for it, to dying in the days of his nurse and his pap-boat, even if it should last him a thousand years?  A thousand years!—­the twinkling of an eye.  Behold this man, who weeps before me; his name resounded once over all our Tuscany, and now it is scarcely whispered in his native place.  He was lord there at the time that your once proud but now loathsome Florence had such a lesson given to its frenzy at the battle of Arbia.”

“And what is his name?” inquired Dante.

“Salvani,” returned the limner.  “He is here, because he had the presumption to think that he could hold Sienna in the hollow of his hand.  Fifty years has he paced in this manner.  Such is the punishment for audacity.”

“But why is he here at all,” said Dante, “and not in the outer region, among the delayers of repentance?”

“Because,” exclaimed the other, “in the height of his ascendancy he did not disdain to stand in the public place in Sienna, and, trembling in every vein, beg money from the people to ransom a friend from captivity.  Do I appear to thee to speak with mysterious significance?  Thy countrymen shall too soon help thee to understand me."[25]

Virgil now called Dante away from Oderisi, and bade him notice the ground on which they were treading.  It was pavement, wrought all over with figures, like sculptured tombstones.  There was Lucifer among them, struck flaming down from heaven; and Briareus, pinned to the earth with the thunderbolt, and, with the other giants, amazing the gods with his hugeness; and Nimrod, standing confounded at the foot of Babel; and Niobe, with her despairing eyes, turned into stone amidst her children; and Saul, dead on his own sword in Gilboa; and Arachne, now half spider, at fault on her own broken web; and Rehoboam, for all his insolence, flying in terror in his chariot; and Alcmaeon, who made his mother pay with her life for the ornament she received to betray his father; and Sennacherib, left dead by his son in the temple; and the head of Cyrus, thrown by the motherless woman into the goblet of blood, that it might swill what it had thirsted for; and Holofernes, beheaded; and his Assyrians flying at his death; and Troy, all become cinders and hollow places.  Oh! what a fall from pride was there!  Now, maintain the loftiness of your looks, ye sons of Eve, and walk with proud steps, bending not your eyes on the dust ye were, lest ye perceive the evil of your ways.[26]

“Behold,” said Virgil, “there is an angel coming.”

The angel came on, clad in white, with a face that sent trembling beams before it, like the morning star.  He skewed the pilgrims the way up to the second circle; and then, beating his wings against the forehead of Dante, on which the seven initials of sin were written, told him he should go safely, and disappeared.