some colour to the pleasant supposition that she is at least included in the ogni cosa diletta più caramente, which Cacciaguida in Par. xvii. tells Dante he will be forced to leave. Dante's sons, Pietro and Jacopo, together with his daughter Beatrice were with their father in Ravenna at this time, but Gemma, with the other daughter Antonia, certainly remained in Florence. It is, however, probable that there was no real misunderstanding between husband and wife known to Dante's friends, or Giovanni would hardly bave ventured upon what would have been a highly tactless allusion, unless Phyllis is taken as a mere personification of the poet's native city.

Dante seems already to have been regarded, both by himself and by others, as quite an old man; Giovanni addresses him as divine senex and blande senex, and Dante responds in the same strain. It is, however, to be remembered that, in the Convito, Dante describes senettute (old age) as the period following after gioventute (the perfect age), the descent of the arch of man's life from the 45th to the 70th year, and he had reached the age of 56 before his death. A year is said to have elapsed before Dante answered Giovanni with his second Eclogue. It is in the same spirit as the first, full of friendly feeling towards Giovanni himself, with some more pleasant joking with young "Melibœus"; but still, courteously and firmly, declining to visit Bologna. It was only after Dante's death that his son found this Eclogue among his father's papers, and sent it to " Mopsus at Bologna; and the Bolognese scholar read in it the pathetic reference to the laurel crown, not of earth, but of heaven:

Hoc illustre caput, cui jam frondator in alta
Virgine perpetuas festinat cernere frondes.

"

which Dr. Plumptre in his translation of the Eclogues has rendered

This honoured head to gather wreaths for which,
Wreaths that fade not, e'en now prepares himself
The dresser of the vineyard.

Thus Dante and his young admirer never met upon earth, and Giovanni, disappointed in his hopes of assisting at the Master's coronation, had to content himself with writing his epitaph.

These two Eclogues, so noble and so kindly, so comparatively free from anger and rancour, should be set by the concluding cantos of the Paradiso, and especially by that exquisite passage which opens which opens Canto xviii., where some bitter thought of vengeance enters into Dante's mind, but is instantly dispelled by the words of Beatrice: muta pensier, change thy thought. This muta pensier is doubtless the key-note to the poet's latest years, and to this same epoch may, perhaps, be ascribed that sonnet addressed to Giovanni Quirino, and so beautifully translated by Rossetti in his Dante and his Circle, in which Dante rejoices that his bitter rancour is dispelled and that his thoughts are already absorbed in the anticipation of Paradise.

Lo Re, che merta i suoi servi a ristoro

Con abbondanza, e vince ogni misura,
Mi fa lasciare la fiera rancura,

E drizzar gli occhi al sommo concistoro.

E qui pensando al glorioso coro
De' cittadin della cittade pura
Laudando il Creatore, io creatura
Di più laudarlo sempre m'innamoro.
Chè s'io contemplo il gran premio venturo,
A che Dio chiama la cristiana prole,
Per me niente altro che quello si vuole:

Ma di te, caro amico, sì mi duole,

Che non rispetti al secolo futuro,
E perdi per lo vano il ben sicuro.

APPENDIX A.

DANTE'S SONNET TO GIOVANNI QUIRINO.

IT is to be regretted that the authenticity of this fine sonnet-Lo Re che merta i suoi servi a ristoro (xliv. in Fraticelli's edition)-is not beyond doubt. If genuine, it would be one of the few lyrics which can with any probability be referred to the closing years of Dante's life. Besides Rossetti's version, there is an excellent translation by Plumptre; and the two are worth comparing. Rossetti's is of course more poetical, but Plumptre's has the advantage of reproducing more exactly the metre of the original.

ROSSETTI.

The King by whose rich grace His servants be
With plenty beyond measure set to dweil

Crúains that I my bitter wrath dispel
And lift mine eyes to the great consistory;
Till, noting how in glorious quires agree
The citizens of that fair citadel,

To the Creator I His creature swell

Their song, and all their love possesses me.

So, when I contemplate the great reward

To which our God has called the Christian seed,

I long for nothing else but only this.

And then my soul is grieved in thy regard,

Dear friend, who reck'st not of thy nearest need,
Renouncing for slight joys the perfect bliss.

PLUMPTRE.

The king, who doth his servants recompense
In fullest measure, heaped and running o'er,
Bids me my rancorous pride indulge no more,
And to the highest Council look from hence:
And thinking on the choir of citizens,

Who in the heavenly city evermore

Praise their Creator, I, a creature, soar,
Eager to praise yet more His love immense.
For if the future prize I contemplate,

To which God calls all born of Christian race,

Nought else can in my wishes find a place.

But much I mourn for thee, dear friend, whose face
Turns not to look upon that future state,

Losing sure good for shows that hope frustrate.

Like several other sonnets from the same Ambrosian MS., this sonnet shows a certain peculiarity of structure which is not often found in Dante's undoubtedly genuine poems of this class. It will be seen that in the original, as in Plumptre's translation, the rhyme-arrangement of the sestet follows the formula:

a-b-bb-a-a,

thus ending in a rhymed couplet, a rima baciata. In the unfinished De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante did not reach the point at which he intended to treat of the Sonnet, so we have not his own theory of its ideal structure and rhyme arrangement, as we have in the case of the more complicated Canzone. In the Vita Nuova, Dante shows a distinct preference for three rhyme-sounds in the sestet; out of the twenty-three poems which follow the normal sonnet structure, there are only three with sestets constructed upon two rhymes. Of these three, two follow the arrangement expressed by the formula:—

a-b-a: b-a-b;

while the other, which is the first sonnet in the Vita Nuova describing the vision which the other poets were to expound, exhibits a rather peculiar type of sestet with the rhyme arrangement:

a-b-a a-b-a,

which was followed by Guido Cavalcanti and by Cino da Pistoia in their answers. The structure of the sestet with two rhymes and the closing couplet rhyming with the first line:

a-b-bb-a-a,

does not occur in the Vita Nuova. Besides the sonnet to Giovanni Quirino, there are only five, of the forty-four sonnets regarded by Fraticelli as probably genuine, which have this ending a rima baciata. Although the authenticity of none of these five is absolutely certain, there is considerable probability in favour of several of them being really by Dante. This same rhyme-arrangement was frequently employed by Cino da Pistoia, and is not quite unknown even in Petrarch; out of the latter's 317 sonnets, four have sestets constructed upon this two-rhyme formula with a rhymed couplet at the close, and one of these is the famous tenth Sonnet of the first part of the Canzoniere (or xii. in Signor Mestica's Edizione Critica) — Quando fra l'altre donne ad ora ad ora— which expresses the most purely spiritual of Petrarch's early conceptions of love. In the particular instance of the sonnet to Quirino, the rhyme-arrangement may be merely due to the fact that it was written in answer to a sonnet with its sestet constructed on this principle.

Giovanni Quirino was a Venetian. Besides the fine sonnet addressed to Dante (translated in Dante and his Circle), commencing Lode di Dio e della Madre pura, in which he commends Dante's labour to the glory of God and of His Virgin Mother, and which called forth Dante's