BEATRICE.--Although Leonardo Bruni rebukes Boccaccio, “our Boccaccio that most sweet and pleasant man,” for having lingered so long over Dante’s love affairs, still the story of the poet’s first love remains the one salient fact of his youth and early manhood. We may surmise from the _Vita Nuova_ that at the end of his eighteenth year, presumably in May 1283, Dante became enamoured of the glorious lady of his mind, Beatrice, who had first appeared to him as a child in her ninth year, nine years before. It is not quite certain whether Beatrice was her real name or one beneath which Dante conceals her identity; assuredly she was “Beatrice,” the giver of blessing, to him and through him to all lovers of the noblest and fairest things in literature. Tradition, following Boccaccio, has identified her with Bice, the daughter of Folco Portinari, a wealthy Florentine who founded the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, and died in 1289 (_cf._ _V. N._ xxii.). Folco’s daughter is shown by her father’s will to have been the wife of Simone dei Bardi, a rich and noble banker. This has been confirmed by the discovery that, while the printed commentary of Dante’s son Pietro upon the _Commedia_ hardly suggests that Beatrice was a real woman at all, there exists a fuller and later recension by Pietro of his own work which contains a distinct statement that the lady raised to fame in his father’s poem was in very fact Bice Portinari. Nevertheless, there are still found critics who see in Beatrice not a real woman, but a mystically exalted ideal of womanhood or a merely allegorical figure; while Scartazzini at one time maintained that the woman Dante loved was an unknown Florentine maiden, who would have been his wife but for her untimely death. This can hardly be deduced from the _Vita Nuova_; in its noblest passages the woman of Dante’s worship is scarcely regarded as an object that can be possessed; death has not robbed him of an expected beatitude, but all the world of an earthly miracle. But, although it was in the fullest correspondence with mediaeval ideals and fashions that chivalrous love and devotion should be directed by preference to a married woman, the love of Dante for Beatrice was something at once more real and more exalted than the artificial passion of the troubadours; a true romantic love that linked heaven to earth, and was a revelation for the whole course of life.