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Dante was born in Florence, of the noble family of Alighieri, which was attached to the papal, or Guelph party, in opposition to the imperial, or Ghibelline. He was but a child when death deprived him of his father; but his mother took the greatest pains with his education, placing him under the tuition of Brunetto Latini, and other masters of eminence.
An illustrious stranger, banished from Italy, one Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, who had sought a refuge in France, wrote his views on the matter, which in substance were as above. About this time originated the progenitors of the gloriettes, which became so greatly the vogue in the eighteenth century.
It was a brave and chivalrous soldier that stood there in the sight of all Florence, a figure infinitely better to my eyes than the scholar who dogged the footsteps of Brunetto Latini, or even than the poet whose songs had enchanted the city.
You may be pleased here to remind me of the discourse between Messer Brunetto Latini and Dante, which I strove to overhear on that May morning in the Piazza Santa Felicita, to which I will make bold to answer that I did not truly overhear much at the time, and that the substance of what I set down was garnered later, both from Dante and from Messer Brunetto.
Cimabue took Giotto from his father, glad to be rid of the misshapen child that had to be fed and could do nothing much in return; and from the smoky hut in the little Tuscan valley the lad was taken straight to the old nobleman painter's house in the most beautiful city of Italy, was handed over to Brunetto Latini, Dante's tutor, to be taught book-learning, and was allowed to spend the other half of his time in the painting room, at the elbow of the greatest living painter.
But little use, however, seems to have been made of this, for Brunetto Latini, Dante's tutor, when on a visit to Roger Bacon in 1258, states that the friar had shown him the magnet and its properties, but adds that, however useful the discovery, "no master mariner would dare to use it, lest he should be thought to be a magician."
He speaks of himself as drawing an angel in his tablets on the first anniversary of Beatrice's death. One of his instructors was Brunetto Latini, the most famous scholar then living; and he studied both at the universities of Padua and Bologna.
Salvatori was elected Mayor of the town during the Republic, and the next four prisoners held the office there of "Anziani" at the same period, an office which corresponds somewhat to that of Alderman in our old civic days. The chief witnesses for the prosecution were Latini, who so narrowly escaped execution, and the widow of De Angelis, persons not likely to be the most impartial of witnesses.
He did not duly consider that in Dante's time these fearful things were an indispensable part of every man's theory of the world; and, blinded by his kindly prejudices, he does not seem to have perceived that Dante, in accepting eternal torments as part and parcel of the system of nature, was nevertheless, in describing them, inspired with that ineffable tenderness of pity which, in the episodes of Francesca and of Brunetto Latini, has melted the hearts of men in past times, and will continue to do so in times to come.
To the same Brunetto Latini the teacher of Dante who, in his 'Canzoni, adopts the customary manner of the 'Trovatori, we owe the first-known 'versi sciolti, or blank hendecasyllabic verses, and in his apparent absence of form, a true and genuine passion suddenly showed itself.
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