ardice or little prowess, but
by the greater number of their enemies were they put to the
rout and slain. The soldiers of Florence that were used to
fighting slew them; the villeins had no pity."

"Pity" is almost the characteristic word of Dino Compagni--pity alike
for foe or friend; for the warriors of Arezzo or the starved-out
patriots of Pistoja as well as for the heroes of his own Florence; pity
for the victims of her feuds, and even for the men who drove them into
exile; pity, most of all, for Florence herself. We read his story indeed
at first with a strange sense of disappointment and surprise. To the
modern reader the story of Florence in the years which Dino covers is
above all the story of Dante. As the 'Chronicle' jots patiently down the
hopes and fears, the failures and successes of the wiser citizens in
that struggle for order and good government which brought Dante to his
long exile, we feel ourselves standing in the very midst of events out
of which grew the threefold Poem of the After-World and face to face
with the men who front us in the 'Inferno' and 'Paradise.' But this is
not the world Dino stands in. Of what seem to us the greater elements of
the life around him he sees and tells us nothing. Of art or letters his
'Chronicle' says never a word. The name of Dante is mentioned but once
and then without a syllable of comment. It is not in Dante that Dino
interests himself: his one interest, his one passion is Florence.

And yet as we read page after page a new interest in the story grows on
us, the interest that Dino himself felt in the tragedy around him. Our
sympathies go with that earnest group of men to which he belonged, men
who struggled honestly to reconcile freedom and order in a State torn
with antipathies of the past, with jealousies and ambitions and feuds of
the present. The terrible sadness of the 'Divina Commedia' becomes more
intelligible as we follow step by step the ruin of those hopes for his
country which Dante entertained as well as Dino. And beyond this
interest there is the social picture of the Florence of the fourteenth
century itself, its strange medley of past and present, the old world of
feudalism jostling with the new world of commerce, the trader elbowing
the noble and the artisan the trader, an enthusiastic mystical devotion
jealous of the new classicalism or the scepticism of men like Guido
Cavalcanti, the petty rivalries of great houses alternating with