some Priestcraft; maybe its poison is drawn from all four; be it how it
may, it is the duty of all Italians to pluck hard at the arrow of hell,
so that the smile of God alone shall remain with their children's
children.

Yonder in the plains we have done much; the rest will lie with you, the
Freed Nation.

* * *

There is an old legend, he made answer to me, an old monkish tale, which
tells how, in the days of King Clovis, a woman, old and miserable,
forsaken of all, and at the point of death, strayed into the Merovingian
woods, and lingering there, and hearkening to the birds, and loving
them, and so learning from them of God, regained, by no effort of her
own, her youth; and lived, always young and always beautiful, a hundred
years; through all which time she never failed to seek the forests when
the sun rose, and hear the first song of the creatures to whom she owed
her joy. Whoever to the human soul can be, in ever so faint a sense,
that which the birds were to the woman in the Merovingian woods, he, I
think, has a true greatness. But I am but an outcast, you know; and my
wisdom is not of the world.

Yet it seemed the true wisdom, there, at least, with the rose light
shining across half the heavens, and the bells ringing far away in the
plains below over the white waves of the sea of olives.

* * *

Only for the people! Altro! did not Sperone and all the critics at his
heels pronounce Ariosto only fit for the vulgar multitude? and was not
Dante himself called the laureate of the cobblers and the bakers?

And does not Sacchetti record that the great man took the trouble to
quarrel with an ass-driver and a blacksmith because they recited his
verses badly?

If he had not written "only for the people," we might never have got
beyond the purisms of Virgilio, and the Ciceronian imitations of Bembo.

Dante now-a-days may have become the poet of the scholars and the sages,
but in his own times he seemed to the sciolists a most terribly low
fellow for using his mother tongue; and he was most essentially the poet
of the vulgar--of the _vulgare eloquio_, of the _vulgare illustre_; and
pray what does the "Commedia" mean if not a _canto villereccio_, a song
for the rustics? Will you tell me that?

Only for the people! Ah, that is the error. Only! how like a woman that
is! Any trash will do for the people; that is the modern notion; vile
roulades in music, tawdry crudities in pa