account of his manners and inclinations: He dressed with
a becoming gravity; was temperate in his diet; a great student; seldom
spoke, unless spoken to, but always to the purpose; and almost all the
anecdotes recorded of him, except by himself, are full of pride and
sarcasm. He was so swarthy, that a woman, as he was going by a door in
Verona, is said to have pointed him out to another, with a remark
which made the saturnine poet smile--"That is the man who goes to hell
whenever he pleases, and brings back news of the people there." On which
her companion observed--"Very likely; don't you see what a curly beard he
has, and what a dark face? owing, I dare say, to the heat and smoke." He
was evidently a passionate lover of painting and music--is thought to
have been less strict in his conduct with regard to the sex than might
be supposed from his platonical aspirations--(Boccaccio says, that even
a goitre did not repel him from the pretty face of a mountaineer)--could
be very social when he was young, as may be gathered from the sonnet
addressed to his friend Cavalcante about a party for a boat--and though
his poetry was so intense and weighty, the laudable minuteness of a
biographer has informed us, that his hand-writing, besides being neat
and precise, was of a long and particularly thin character: "meagre" is
his word.

There is a letter, said to be nearly coeval with his time, and to be
written by the prior of a monastery to a celebrated Ghibelline leader, a
friend of Dante's, which, though hitherto accounted apocryphal by most,
has such an air of truth, and contains an image of the poet in his exile
so exceedingly like what we conceive of the man, that it is difficult
not to believe it genuine, especially as the handwriting has lately been
discovered to be that of Boccaccio.[16] At all events, I am sure the
reader will not be sorry to have the substance of it. The writer says,
that he perceived one day a man coming into the monastery, whom none of
its inmates knew. He asked him what he wanted; but the stranger saying
nothing, and continuing to gaze on the building as though contemplating
its architecture, the question was put a second time; upon which,
looking round on his interrogators, he answered, "_Peace_!" The prior,
whose curiosity was strongly excited, took the stranger apart, and
discovering who he was, shewed him all the attention becoming his fame;
and then Dante took a little book out of his bosom, aid obse