ely portrait of him--painted by Giotto,
on the walls of the Bargello, at the age of twenty-four side by side
with Brunetto Latini and Corso Donati, and holding in his hand a
pomegranate, the mystic type of good works--shows that he was already
a man of distinction, and a favorite in the upper classes of
Florentine society. He began to take an active part in politics, and
in 1295 was formally enrolled in the Guild of Physicians and
Apothecaries. On June 11, 1289, he fought as a volunteer in the battle
of Campaldino. Amid these scenes of ambition and warfare he fell away
for a time from his holiest aspirations. From theology he turned to
purely human and materialist philosophy; from an ideal of pure love to
earthlier defilements. It was perhaps with a desire to aid himself in
the struggle against life's temptations that he seems to have become a
member of the Tertiary Order of St. Francis of Assisi, for whom he had
a passionate admiration. The Tertiaries did not abandon the secular
life, but wore the cord of the order, and pledged themselves to lives
of sanctity and devotion. Legend says that by his own desire he was
buried in the dress of a Franciscan Tertiary. Yet there is evidence
that he felt the inefficacy of any external bond. Experience taught
him that the serge robe and the binding cord might only be the
concealment of the hypocrite; and that they were worse than valueless
without the purification of the heart. In the eighth Bolgia of the
eighth circle of the "Inferno" he sees the givers of evil counsel, and
among them Guido da Montefeltro, who, toward the close of his life had
become a Cordelier or Franciscan Friar, hoping to make atonement for
his sins. But tempted by Boniface VIII. with a promise of futile
absolution, he gave him advice to take the town of Palestrina by "long
promises and scant fulfilments." Trusting in the Pope's absolution,
and not in the law of God, he was one of those who--

"Dying put on the weeds of Dominic,
Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised,"

and believed that St. Francis would draw him up by his cord even from
the pit of hell. But when he dies, though St. Francis comes to take
him, one of the Black Cherubim of hell seizes and claims him, truly
urging that absolution for an _intended_ sin is a contradiction in
terms, since absolution assumes penitence. Again, among the hypocrites
in the sixth Bolgia, Dante sees men approach in dazzling cloaks, of
which the hoods cover thei