iate men. Petrarch reports of
him that being at Can della Scala's court, and blamed one day for his
gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like way. Della
Scala stood among his courtiers, with mimes and buffoons (_nebulones ac
histriones_) making him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, he said:
"Is it not strange, now, that this poor fool should make himself so
entertaining; while you, a wise man, sit there day after day, and have
nothing to amuse us with at all?" Dante answered bitterly: "No,
not strange; your Highness is to recollect the Proverb, _Like to
Like_;"--given the amuser, the amusee must also be given! Such a man,
with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was not made
to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be evident to him that he
had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit, in this earth. The
earthly world had cast him forth, to wander, wander; no living heart to
love him now; for his sore miseries there was no solace here.

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him; that
awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its Florences
and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence thou shalt
never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt surely see!
What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life altogether?
ETERNITY: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou and all things
bound! The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home more
and more in that awful other world. Naturally his thoughts brooded on
that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodied or bodiless, it is
the one fact important for all men:--but to Dante, in that age, it was
bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape; he no more doubted of
that _Malebolge_ Pool, that it all lay there with its gloomy circles,
with its _alti guai_, and that he himself should see it, than we doubt
that we should see Constantinople if we went thither. Dante's heart,
long filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe,
bursts forth at length into "mystic unfathomable song;" and this his
_Divine Comedy_, the most remarkable of all modern Books, is the result.

It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see,
a proud thought for him at times, That he, here in exile, could do this
work; that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from doing
it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too