fell from favour on account of his uncourtierlike independence and pride, or at least thought he did so; and after some painful preliminaries of recrimination and mutual wounding, such as so often mark the breaking of a friendship, went away into the coldness of the outer world again, sore and bitter, directing his fierce counter-thrust about the scale, which it was so hard to go up and down, even from the blessed circles of his "Paradise." His last host, who seems to have been a most generous one, was the Lord of Ravenna—Guido da Polenta. Even there, at the last, a lingering fancy seemed to have remained in his mind—half a hope—that he might still be recalled to Florence, and receive the laurel crown of supreme poetic fame within the walls of his beloved San Giovanni, the solemn and beautiful old church now known as the Baptistry, in which he and all Florentines after him have been baptised. Florence, however, obstinately and bitterly rejected, to his latest breath, the poet who is her greatest glory, and he died at Ravenna in the year 1321, aged fifty-six, and still lies there, the people of Ravenna having indignantly rejected the tardy inclination of the Florentines to do honour to their greatest countryman. Dante Alighieri, so much as remains of his mortal frame, is an exile still.
But it is with Florence that his memory is linked, as it is Florence that is foremost in all that he has done. He himself, in his fantastic, visionary, poetic youth, is not more clearly revealed to us in the lovely phantasmagoria of the 'Vita Nuova,' than is the dream-city, all in a dimness and haze of sunshine, where Beatrice, "the youngest of the angels," moves silent in her white robes. Florence is the scene and background of this delicate
