ss a
little piqued, as I think, I made it a point thereafter, whenever Guido
had one of these new poems come to him, to answer it with some poem of
my own, cast in a similar form to that chosen by the unknown. But my
verses were always written in praise of the simple and straightforward
pleasures of sensible men, to whom all this talk about the God of Love
and about some single exalted lady seems strangely away from the mark of
wise living. For assuredly if it be a pleasant thing to love one woman,
it is twenty times as pleasant to love twenty. But I will not give you
all of these poems, nor perhaps any more, for you can read them for
yourselves, if you wish to, in my writings.

Now in a little while this same unknown poet was pleased to put abroad a
certain ballad of his that was ostensibly given over to the praise of
certain lovely ladies of our city. Florence was always a very paradise
of fair women. An inflammable fellow like myself could not walk the
length of a single street without running the risk of half a dozen
heartaches, and never was traveller that came and went but was loud in
his laudations of the loveliness of Florence feminine. A poet,
therefore, could scarcely have a more alluring theme or a livelier or
more likable, and the fact that the mysterious singer had taken such a
subject for his inspiration was rightly regarded as another instance of
his exceeding good sense. It was a very beautiful ballad, fully worthy
of its honorable subject, and it paid many compliments of an exquisite
felicity to many ladies that were indicated plainly enough by some play
upon a name or some praise of an attribute. But it was, or might have
been, plain enough to all that read it that this poem was written for no
other purpose than to bring in by a side wind, as it were, the praise of
a lady that was left nameless, but that he who wrote declared to be the
loveliest lady in that noble city of lovely ladies. This ballad seemed
to be unfinished, for in its last stanza the writer promised to utter
yet more words on this so favorable theme. Now when I had heard of this
poem and before I had read it--for Guido, to whom the first copy was
given, loved it so much and lingered so long upon its lines that he kept
it an unconscionable time from his fellows--I bethought me that I, too,
would write me a set of verses on the brave and fair ladies of Florence,
and that in doing so I could bring in the name of the girl of my heart.

It