ed
by any one who reflects on the difference between a fame accumulated by
ages, and the living poverty that is obliged to seek its bread. A writer
on a monkish subject may have acquired fame with monks, and even with
a few distinguished persons, and yet have been little known, and less
cared for, out of the pale of that very private literary public, which
was almost exclusively their own. When we read, now-a-days, of the great
poet's being so politely received by Can Grande, lord of Verona, and
sitting at his princely table, we are apt to fancy that nothing but
his great poetry procured him the reception, and that nobody present
competed with him in the eyes of his host. But, to say nothing of the
different kinds of retainers that could sit at a prince's table in those
days, Can, who was more ostentatious than delicate in his munificence,
kept a sort of caravansera for clever exiles, whom he distributed into
lodgings classified according to their pursuits;[20] and Dante only
shared his bounty with the rest, till the more delicate poet could no
longer endure either the buffoonery of his companions, or the amusement
derived from it by the master. On one occasion, his platter is slily
heaped with their bones, which provokes him to call them dogs, as having
none to shew for their own. Another time, Can Grande asks him how it is
that his companions give more pleasure at court than himself; to which
he answers, "Because like loves like." He then leaves the court, and his
disgusted superiority is no doubt regarded as a pedantic assumption.

He stopped long nowhere, except with Guido Novello; and when that
prince, whose downfal was at hand, sent him on the journey above
mentioned to Venice, the senate (whom the poet had never offended) were
so little aware of his being of consequence, that they declined giving
him an audience. He went back, and broke his heart. Boccaccio says, that
he would get into such passions with the very boys and girls in the
street, who plagued him with party-words, as to throw stones at them--a
thing that would be incredible, if persons acquainted with his great but
ultra-sensitive nation did not know what Italians could do in all ages,
from Dante's own age down to the times of Alfieri and Foscolo. It
would be as difficult, from the evidence of his own works and of the
exasperation he created, to doubt the extremest reports of his irascible
temper, as it would be not to give implicit faith to his honest