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CHAPTER I.
HIS LIFE.
Dante Alighieri was born at Florence in the month of May in the year 1265, of a family not illustrious, yet occupying a place among the nobility, by right, it would appear, of the knighthood of an ancestor who was a Crusader under the Emperor Conrad; and which was sufficiently important to have already twice suffered banishment when the Ghibelline party, to which they were opposed, got the upper hand. In the usual confusion of names common to this period of Italian history, when the primitive mode of nomenclature, "John the son of Peter," seems to have been that most generally adopted by all but the great houses, it is somewhat difficult to make out why this family should have adopted the name of Alighieri, which came from the maternal side. Probably the lady who first introduced it, the wife of Dante's great-great-grandfather above mentioned—Cacciaguida, who occupies an honourable place in the "Paradiso,"—was of a race more eminent than that into which she married, and it was a distinction to her children to boast themselves degli Alighieri, of the Alighieris—as one would say, of the Howards—a custom still existing in Italy,
