r a little apart, and looking at the eager crowd of youths and
Simone that was its central figure. If I had been a painter like Messer
Giotto it would have pleased me to paint in the same picture the faces
of those two men, the one no more than beastly flesh, and the other, as
it seemed to me, the iron lamp in which a sacred spirit burned
unceasingly, purifying with its glowing flame the human tabernacle. Then
Messer Simone gave a short laugh, and said, mockingly, that such
stay-at-home tactics were well enough for puling fellows that liked to
lie snug behind city walls and write puling sonnets, and would rather be
busy with such petty business than risk their fine skins in brisk
adventures.

Now, as for the taunt in Messer Simone's speech, it was, as who should
say, an arrow that might have been aimed at the heart of many there,
even at my own poor heart, for I was myself an indifferent poet, as you
know by this time if you have not known it before. But I knew that
Messer Simone had no thought of me when he spoke, for indeed I do not
think he thought of me at all, and for my part I thought of him as
little as I could help, for I have no love for ugliness. Messer Guido
Cavalcanti, who was also there, he, too, was a poet, and a great poet,
but it was not of him that Messer Simone spoke, and if it had been it
would not have mattered, for Messer Guido would have cared no whit for
what Messer Simone said of him or thought of him, and now as Simone
spoke, Guido only stood there and laughed in his face, swaying gently
with the laughter.

Messer Guido despised Simone dei Bardi, thinking him, what indeed he
was, a vulgar fellow, and making no concealment of his thought, and what
Messer Guido thought counted in Florence in those days, for he came of a
great race and was himself a very free-hearted and noble gentleman,
against whom no man had anything to say save this, that it was whispered
that he did not believe as a devout man should believe. This tale, for
my part, I hold to be exaggeration, thinking that Messer Guido, in the
curious clarity and balance of his mind, was less of a sceptic than of a
man who should say, standing in a strange country, "I do not know
whither my road shall lead me, and therefore I will not say that I do
know."

Anyway, it was not with Messer Guido Cavalcanti that Messer Simone dei
Bardi would have chosen to quarrel, unless the quarrel were forced upon
him, and then I will do him the justice to s