the stinging brevity of an allusion here and there in his great poem, how bitter it was to eat the bread of others, and to go up and down the scale or stairs (an expression always believed to refer to the Delia Scala family, in which he had found one of his most powerful patrons) of a stranger's bounty. This sharp suggestion of reproach, if really intended, as all the commentators upon Dante believe it to have been, has the cruel keenness in it of that revenge which a dependent and obliged person has it in his power to take for unconsidered slights—perhaps the bitterest and most wounding of all revenges. It was during this time of exile, however, that the great work of Dante's life was done. He had begun his "Comedy" (for the title of "Divine" is of later date), Boccaccio says, during his period of prosperity, in Latin, the legitimate vehicle, as everybody thought, for dignified composition; and he is supposed to have completed the first seven cantos of the "Inferno" before his banishment. All that is known of this, however, is the first three lines, which are halting enough. It was not till some years after (according to Boccaccio's story), that the manuscript of this unsuccessful beginning was found in one of the receptacles into which Dante's wife had hastily thrown the valuables of the family when sentence was pronounced against her absent husband. The bundle of papers caught the eye of a young spectator, Dante's nephew, himself disposed to rhyming; and by his means this first essay was sent to the poet, who had for the moment taken refuge in the castle of a friendly Baron Malaspina, in Lunigiana. The five years which had elapsed before this precious packet reached him had been spent partly in wild rushing to and fro, embassies here and there to seek help for himself and his brother exiles, conspiracies
