there to receive the laurel crown. He expresses wonder that his friend should prefer the arid rocks of the Cyclops,' by which he means Bologna, to the fertile plains of Pelorus,' by which he means Ravenna, and represents in glowing terms the superiority of his sojourn in the latter place. But perhaps the stronger reason for his refusal may be found in the following touching passage at the beginning of the 25th canto of the Paradiso':Se mai continga che 'l Poema sacro

Al quale ha posta mano e cielo e terra,
Si, che m' ha fatto per molti anni macro,
Vinca la crudeltà, che fuor mi serra

Del bel ovile, ov' io dormii agnello,
Nimico a' lupi, che gli danno guerra:
Con altra voce omai, con altro vello
Ritornerò poeta; ed in sul fonte

Del mio battesimo prendero 'l cappello.1

It is evident from this passage that he never to the last abandoned all hope of being recalled by his ungrateful country; that he looked for the possibility of such a recall, to his fame as a poet; and that the triumph of the laurel crown, which would have been inexpressibly dear to him when awarded by his native city, had small value for him under other circumstances.

The friendship of Guido Polentano then, and the sojourn at Ravenna, with its splendid memorials of the first centuries of Christianity, and its celebrated and lovely Pineta, the forest of stone pines, which shelter it from the blasts of the angry Adriatic, were agreeable to Dante. But that friendship and the climatic character of the district combined were the causes of his death in less than two years from the time of his arrival in Ravenna. The poet had just completed his immortal work, when Venice threatened his host the Lord of Ravenna with hostilities. Guido begged Dante to go to Venice as his ambassador, to endeavour to make terms of peace. The embassy does not seem to have accomplished much; and Dante, not permitted by the churlish animosity of the Venetian Senators to return by sea, was obliged to make the journey by land, through the malaria-smitten marshy plains at the mouths of the Po, in the very midst of the summer heats. He caught the malaria fever, and, despite all that the affectionate care of his host could do to save him, died of it on September 14, 1321, in the fifty-seventh year of his age.

The troubles which shortly overtook Guido prevented him from

'If ever it should chance that the sacred poem, to which both heaven and earth have contributed, and which for many a year has made me thin, should conquer the cruelty which shuts me out from the dear fold wherein I slept a lamb, enemy as I was to the wolves which make war against it, then with another voice and with another fleece I will return a poet, and receive the crown in the same temple wherein I was baptised.'

90 HOMES AND HAUNTS OF THE ITALIAN POETS. carrying into effect his purpose of erecting such a memorial to his illustrious friend as should duly mark his appreciation of him. But that which the Polentano did not live to do, Bernardo Bembo did in 1483, Cardinal Domenico Corsi a second time in 1691; and, lastly, Cardinal Luigi Valenti in 1790 erected the monument which the people of Ravenna still point out with a just pride to strangers.

Florence has within the last few years erected to her disowned son a monument in Santa Croce—the Tuscan Westminster Abbey as graceless and ugly as her conduct to him, which she can point out with pride to no man! She stoned the prophet whom God had sent to her! She exhibited to the world an example, memorable for ever, of the hatred which the little and the base feel for the great and noble. Dante died,' as Signor Fraticelli says of him, 'before he had reached old age, a man unhappy from his youth upwards: first from the loss of the woman he loved; then in the services he would fain have rendered to his country; condemned, persecuted, defamed by his own fellow citizens; unhappy in his dearest hopes for the regeneration of Italy; unhappy in his hope of a return to his home; in poverty, and almost in beggary, a lifelong wanderer from city to city!'

Yet it may surely be asserted without fear of errors that these sufferings were the price he had paid for his immortality;-that without them the world would never have possessed that тημа Es aiɛ the Divina Commedia.'

1 1

A Modern Green-room.

THE fascination which the stage exercises over a large portion of mankind extends to all its belongings. Charles Lamb has celebrated in a never-to-be-forgotten essay the rapture he experienced at his first play,' and the species of ecstasy with which he contemplated the uplifting of that curtain which was to him' a veil drawn between two worlds.' Most playgoers can recall a somewhat similar experience. Not a few are there, indeed, who never lose the freshness of delight, and to whom a theatre remains something like a paradise. It is a well-known fact that an actor's holiday is ordinarily spent in a theatre, and the afternoon performances which during recent years have been established in London, and which seem likely in time to restore the primitive hours of theatrical representations, are crowded with members of what is affectionately called the profession. This devotion is not confined to men who have followed the art as a means of livelihood, but extends to those who might be supposed to be most blasés. I remember to have seen again and again a display of enthusiasm absolutely boyish on the part of a critic of half a century's standing, to whom every form of theatrical exhibition must have been familiar and commonplace. The playgoer is, in fact, and ought to be, always a child. If he cannot surrender himself to the illusions of stage magic, if he remain 'nothing if not critical,' and reason concerning the origin of his emotions instead of yielding to them, he ceases soon to deserve the name. When, however, he is a playgoer in the full sense of the word, that mimic world retains its fascination, and is for ever

Apparelled in celestial light

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

We follow the actors with a personal regard such as no other class of men can inspire. Their haunts, their habits, are matters of interest to us, and their death, as Johnson said of Garrick, eclipses the gaiety of nations, and impoverishes the public stock of harmless pleasure.'

Whoever has seen the children outside the booths of a fair, striving to find a chink in the canvas through which a glimpse may be obtained of the fairy realm within, and listening to the music that reaches them in maddening strains, will find some