cian; as perfect in prose and verse as he was in public
speaking a most noble orator; in rhyming excellent,
with the most polished and beautiful style that ever
appeared in our language up to this time or since.
He wrote in his youth the book of The Early Life of
Love, and afterwards when in exile made twenty moral
and amorous canzonets very excellent, and among
other things three noble epistles: one he sent to the
Florentine government, complaining of his undeserved
exile; another to the Emperor Henry when he was at
the siege of Brescia, reprehending him for his delay,
and almost prophesying; the third to the Italian car-
dinals during the vacancy after the death of Pope
Clement, urging them to agree in electing an Italian
Pope; all in Latin, with noble precepts and excellent
sentences and authorities, which were much com-
mended by the wise and learned. And be wrote the
Commedia, where, in polished verse and with great
and subtile arguments, moral, natural, astrological,
philosophical, and theological, with new and beautiful
figures, similes, and poetical graces, he composed and
treated in a hundred chapters or cantos of the exist-
ence of hell, purgatory, and paradise; so loftily as
may be said of it, that whoever is of subtile intellect
may by his said treatise perceive and understand. He
was well pleased in this poem to blame and cry out,
in the manner of poets, in some places perhaps more
than he ought to have done; but it may be that his
exile made him do so. He also wrote the Monarchia,
where he treats of the office of popes and emperors.
And he began a comment on fourteen of the above-
named moral canzonets in the vulgar tongue, which in
consequence of his death is found imperfect except on

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