ests itself: our teaching is for the many, and the
teaching of that day was for the few.

Let anyone try and imagine the childhood of Giotto as the account of it
has come down to us through almost all the authorities. He was born in
the year 1276--when Dante was about eleven years old. That was the time
when the wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines were at their height. That was
the year in which Count Ugolino della Gherardesca got back his lordship
over Pisa--where he was to be starved to death with his two sons and two
grandsons some twelve years later. That was the time when four Popes
died in sixteen months--the time when the Sicilian Vespers drove Charles
of Anjou from Sicily for ever--when Guido da Montefeltro was fighting
and betraying and fighting again--the time of Dante's early youth, in
which fell most of those deeds for which he consigned the doers to hell
and their names to immortality.

Imagine, then, what a shepherd's hut must have been in those days, in a
narrow valley of the Tuscan hills--the small cottage built of unhewn
stones picked up on the hillside, fitted together one by one, according
to their irregular shapes, and cemented, if at all, with clay and mud
from the river bed--the roof of untrimmed saplings tied together and
thatched with chestnut boughs, held down by big stones, lest the wind
should blow them away. The whole, dark brown and black with the rich
smoke of brushwood burned in the corner to boil the big black cauldron
of sheep's milk for the making of the rank 'pecorino' cheese. One square
room, lighted from the door only. The floor, the beaten earth. The beds,
rough-hewn boards, lying one above the other, like bunks, on short
strong lengths of sapling stuck into the wall. For mattresses, armfuls
of mountain hay. The people, a man, his wife and two or three children,
dressed winter and summer in heavy brown homespun woollen and
sheepskins. For all furniture, a home-made bench, black with age and
smoke. The food, day in, day out, coarse yellow meal, boiled thick in
water and poured out to cool upon the black bench, divided into portions
then with a thin hide thong, crosswise and lengthwise, for each person a
yellow square, and eaten greedily with unwashed hands that left a little
for the great sheep-dog. The drink, spring water and the whey left from
the cheese curds, drunk out of a small earthen pot, passed from mouth
to mouth. A silent bunch of ignorant human beings, full of thought for
th