ied also. This life-long pertinacity
of will is illustrative of his whole career.

Meantime, though the young poet's father had died, nothing was wanting
on the part of his guardians, or perhaps his mother, to furnish him with
an excellent education. It was so complete, as to enable him to become
master of all the knowledge of his time; and he added to this learning
more than a taste for drawing and music. He speaks of himself as drawing
an angel in his tablets on the first anniversary of Beatrice's death.[9]
One of his instructors was Brunetto Latini, the most famous scholar then
living; and he studied both at the universities of Padua and Bologna. At
eighteen, perhaps sooner, he had shown such a genius for poetry as
to attract the friendship of Guido Cavalcante, a young noble of a
philosophical as well as poetical turn of mind, who has retained a
reputation with posterity: and it was probably at the same time he
became acquainted with Giotto, who drew his likeness, and with Casella,
the musician, whom he greets with so much tenderness in the other world.

Nor were his duties as a citizen forgotten. The year before Beatrice's
death, he was at the battle of Campaldino, which his countrymen gained
against the people of Arezzo; and the year after it he was present at
the taking of Caprona from the Pisans. It has been supposed that he once
studied medicine with a view to it as a profession; but the conjecture
probably originated in nothing more than his having entered himself of
one of the city-companies (which happened to be the medical) for the
purpose of qualifying himself to accept office; a condition exacted of
the gentry by the then democratic tendencies of the republic. It is
asserted also, by an early commentator, that he entered the Franciscan
order of friars, but quitted it before he was professed; and, indeed,
the circumstance is not unlikely, considering his agitated and impatient
turn of mind. Perhaps he fancied that he had done with the world when it
lost the wife of Simone de' Bardi.

Weddings that might have taken place but do not, are like the reigns
of deceased heirs-apparent; every thing is assumable in their favour,
checked only by the histories of husbands and kings. Would the great
but splenetic poet have made an angel and a saint of Beatrice, had he
married her? He never utters the name of the woman whom he did marry.

Gemma Donati was a kinswoman of the powerful family of that name. It
seems not