“Thou honour’st verse, and verse must lend her wing
  To honour thee, the priest of Phoebus’ quire,
  That tun’st their happiest lines in hymn or story. 
  Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher
  Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing,
  Met in the milder shades of Purgatory.” ]

[Footnote 7:  Manfredi was the natural son of the Emperor Frederick the Second.  “He was lively and agreeable in his manners,” observes Mr. Cary, “and delighted in poetry, music, and dancing.  But he was luxurious and ambitious, void of religion, and in his philosophy an epicurean.” Translation of Dante, Smith’s edition, p. 77.  Thus King Manfredi ought to have been in a red-hot tomb, roasting for ever with Epicurus himself, and with the father of the poet’s beloved friend, Guido Cavalcante:  but he was the son of an emperor, and a foe to the house of Anjou; so Dante gives him a passport to heaven.  There is no ground whatever for the repentance assumed in the text.]

[Footnote 8:  The unexpected bit of comedy here ensuing is very remarkable and pleasant.  Belacqua, according to an old commentator, was a musician.]

[Footnote 9:  Buonconte was the son of that Guido da Montefeltro, whose soul we have seen carried off from St. Francis by a devil, for having violated the conditions of penitence.  It is curious that both father and son should have been contested for in this manner.]

[Footnote 10:  This is the most affecting and comprehensive of all brief stories.

  “Deh quando to sarai tornato al mondo,
  E riposato de la lunga via,
  Seguito ’l terzo spirito al secondo,

  Ricorditi di me che son la Pia: 
  Siena mi fe; disfecemi Maremma;
  Salsi colui che ’nnanellata pria

  Disposando m’ avea con la sua gemma.”

  Ah, when thou findest thee again on earth
  (Said then a female soul), remember me,—­
  Pia.  Sienna was my place of birth,

  The Marshes of my death.  This knoweth he,
  Who placed upon my hand the spousal ring.

“Nello della Pietra,” says M. Beyle, in his work entitled De l’Amour, “obtained in marriage the hand of Madonna Pia, sole heiress of the Ptolomei, the richest and most noble family of Sienna.  Her beauty, which was the admiration of all Tuscany, gave rise to a jealousy in the breast of her husband, that, envenomed by wrong reports and suspicions continually reviving, led to a frightful catastrophe.  It is not easy to determine at this day if his wife was altogether innocent; but Dante has represented her as such.  Her husband carried her with him into the marshes of Volterra, celebrated then, as now, for the pestiferous effects of the air.  Never would he tell his wife the reason of her banishment into so dangerous a place.  His pride did not deign to pronounce either complaint or accusation.  He lived with her alone, in a deserted tower, of which I have been to see the ruins on the seashore; he never