n the monks for
offences against the rules. Dante's friend, Guido Cavalcanti, expressed
the natural sentiment that poverty is a distressing condition, in a
canzone which bristles with insults hurled at the Queen of the
Franciscans:

Yea, rightly art thou hated worse than death,
For he, at length, is longed for in the breast.

But not with thee, wild beast,
Was ever aught found beautiful or good;
For life is all that man can lose by death,
Not fame and the fair summits of applause;
His glory shall not pause
But live in men's perpetual gratitude.
While he who on thy naked sill has stood
He shall be counted low, etc.

D.G. ROSSETTI.

The concept of the German mystics was infinitely more profound than the
concept of the merely external poverty of the Franciscans, which in the
case of St. Francis and Jacopone was an inherent characteristic and
pure, but in the case of the others more or less vicious. "Man cannot
live in this world without labour," says Eckhart, "but labour is man's
portion; therefore he must learn to have God in his heart, although
surrounded by the things of this world, and not let his business or his
surroundings be a barrier." There is a passage in the book of an unknown
author, entitled _The Imitation of Christ's Poverty_ (formerly ascribed
to Tauler), which reads as follows: "Poverty is equality with God, a
mind turned away from all creatures; poverty clings to nothing and
nothing clings to it; a man who is poor clings to nothing which is
beneath him, but to that alone which is greater than all things. And
that is the loftiest virtue of poverty that it clings only to that which
is sublime and takes no heed of the things which are base, so far as it
is possible." "The soul while it is burdened with temporal and transient
things is not free. Before it can aspire to freedom and nobility it must
cast away all the things of the world." "Nobody can be really poor
unless God make him so; but God makes no man poor unless he be in his
inmost heart; then all things will be taken from him which are not
God's. The more spiritual a man is, the poorer will he be, for
spirituality and poverty are one...." Pseudo-Tauler even affirms that a
man "can possess abundant wealth and yet be poor in spirit." The meaning
of this is clear: He whose heart is not wrapped up in the things of the
world, will find his way to Go