improbable, from some passages in his works, that she was the
young lady whom he speaks of as taking pity on him on account of his
passion for Beatrice;[10] and in common justice to his feelings as a man
and a gentleman, it is surely to be concluded, that he felt some sort
of passion for his bride, if not of a very spiritual sort; though he
afterwards did not scruple to intimate that he was ashamed of it, and
Beatrice is made to rebuke him in the other world for thinking of
any body after herself.[11] At any rate, he probably roused what was
excitable in his wife's temper, with provocations from his own; for the
nature of the latter is not to be doubted, whereas there is nothing but
tradition to shew for the bitterness of hers. Foscolo is of opinion
that the tradition itself arose simply from a rhetorical flourish of
Boccaccio's, in his Life of Dante, against the marriages of men of
letters; though Boccaccio himself expressly adds, that he knows nothing
to the disadvantage of the poet's wife, except that her husband, after
quitting Florence, would never either come where she was, or suffer
her to come to him, mother as she was by him of so many children;--a
statement, it must be confessed, not a little encouraging to the
tradition.[12] Be this as it may, Dante married in his twenty-sixth
year; wrote an adoring account of his first love (the _Vita Nuova_) in
his twenty-eighth; and among the six children which Gemma brought him,
had a daughter whom he named Beatrice, in honour, it is understood, of
the fair Portinari; which surely was either a very great compliment, or
no mean trial to the temper of the mother.

We shall see presently how their domestic intercourse was interrupted,
and what absolute uncertainty there is respecting it, except as far as
conclusions may be drawn from his own temper and history.

Italy, in those days, was divided into the parties of Guelphs and
Ghibellines; the former, the advocates of general church-ascendancy
and local government; the latter, of the pretensions of the Emperor of
Germany, who claimed to be the Roman Caesar, and paramount over the
Pope. In Florence, the Guelphs had for a long time been so triumphant as
to keep the Ghibellines in a state of banishment. Dante was born and
bred a Guelph: he had twice borne arms for his country against Ghibelline
neighbours; and now, at the age of thirty-five, in the ninth of his
marriage, and last of his residence with his wife, he was appointed