(where he is supposed to have relapsed from his fidelity to Beatrice in favour of a certain “Gentucca"); then again in Verona with the new prince, the famous Can Grande (where his sarcasms appear to have lost him a doubtful hospitality); then in a monastery in the mountains of Umbria; in Udine; in Ravenna; and there at length he put up for the rest of his life with his last and best friend, Guido Novello da Polenta, not the father, but the nephew of the hapless Francesca.

It was probably in the middle period of his exile, that in one of the moments of his greatest longing for his native country, he wrote that affecting passage in the Convito, which was evidently a direct effort at conciliation.  Excusing himself for some harshness and obscurity in the style of that work, he exclaims, “Ah! would it had pleased the Dispenser of all things that this excuse had never been needed; that neither others had done me wrong, nor myself undergone penalty undeservedly—­the penalty, I say, of exile and of poverty.  For it pleased the citizens of the fairest and most renowned daughter of Rome—­Florence—­to cast me out of her most sweet bosom, where I was born, and bred, and passed half of the life of man, and in which, with her good leave, I still desire with all my heart to repose my weary spirit, and finish the days allotted me; and so I have wandered in almost every place to which our language extends, a stranger, almost a beggar, exposing against my will the wounds given me by fortune, too often unjustly imputed to the sufferer’s fault.  Truly I have been a vessel without sail and without rudder, driven about upon different ports and shores by the dry wind that springs out of dolorous poverty; and hence have I appeared vile in the eyes of many, who, perhaps, by some better report had conceived of me a different impression, and in whose sight not only has my person become thus debased, but an unworthy opinion created of every thing which I did, or which I had to do.” [14]

How simply and strongly written!  How full of the touching yet undegrading commiseration which adversity has a right to take upon itself, when accompanied with the consciousness of manly endeavour and a good motive!  How could such a man condescend at other times to rage with abuse, and to delight himself in images of infernal torment!

The dates of these fluctuations of feeling towards his native city are not known; but it is supposed to have been not very long before his abode with Can Grande that he received permission to return to Florence, on conditions which he justly refused and resented in the following noble letter to a kinsman.  The old spelling of the original (in the note) is retained as given by Foscolo in the article on “Dante” in the Edinburgh Review (vol.  XXX. no. 60); and I have retained also, with little difference, the translation which accompanies it: