For some years Dante participated in their endeavours to reinstate themselves by force; but eventually, well-nigh as disgusted with his friends as with his enemies, scorning the ignominious terms on which alone return would have been permitted, and especially discouraged by the failure of the Emperor Henry VII., whose advent to Italy he had welcomed with enthusiasm, he became a wanderer among the courts of the princes and nobles of Northern Italy, generally finding honour and protection, which he frequently repaid by diplomatic services. There seems no doubt of his having visited Paris and studied in the University. The alleged extension of his journey to Oxford is unsupported by convincing evidence, but is not impossible or improbable. A writer near his own day seems to assert that he had been in England. During all this time, like his ancient prototype Thucydides, he was devoting himself to his immortal work, which, published as the respective parts were completed, brought him celebrity and wondering reverence even in his lifetime. His most distinguished patron in his later years was Cane della Scala, surnamed the Great, Lord of Verona, from whose court he retired in 1320 to that of Guido Novello da Polenta, at Ravenna. In the following year he undertook a mission to Venice, and there contracted a fever, which, aggravated it is said by the inhospitality of the Venetians in compelling him to return by land, carried him off on September 14, 1321, shortly after he had completed his great epic. His funeral obsequies were celebrated with magnificence; but political troubles delayed for a hundred and sixty years the erection of the monument ultimately raised by the piety of Cardinal Bembo’s father, then governing Ravenna for the Venetians, and inscribed with six rhyming Latin verses attributed without adequate evidence to Dante’s own pen, but sufficiently ancient to have been expanded by Boccaccio into a noble sonnet: _Dante am I, of deepest lore in song Hierophant, elected to combine Inheritance in Art with Nature’s sign, Accounted miracle all men among. Wings of Imagination sure and strong Bore me through worlds infernal and divine, And gave to verse immortal to consign What doth to Earth or doth to Heaven belong. Bright Florence brought me forth, but her fond son To bitter exile drove, step-mother made By guile of tongues malevolent and base. Ravenna sheltered me; in her is laid My dust; my spirit thitherward has gone Where Wisdom reigns, and Envy hath not place._