The _Convivio_ is an attempt to bring philosophy out of the schools of religious and away from the disputations of philosophers, to render her beauty accessible even, to the unlearned. “The _Convivio_”, says Dr. Wicksteed, “might very well be described as an attempt to throw into popular form the matter of the Aristotelian treatises of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas.” Dante’s text is the opening sentence of Aristotle’s _Metaphysics_: “All men by nature desire to know”; which he elaborates from the commentary of Aquinas and the latter’s _Summa contra gentiles_. He would gather up the crumbs which fall from the table where the bread of Angels is eaten, and give a banquet to all who are deprived of this spiritual food. It is the first important work on philosophy written in Italian--an innovation which Dante thinks necessary to defend in the chapters of the introductory treatise, where he explains his reasons for commenting upon these canzoni in the vernacular instead of Latin, and incidentally utters an impassioned defence of his mother-tongue, with noteworthy passages on the vanity of translating poetry into another language and the potentialities of Italian prose (_Conv._ i. 7, 10). In addition to this principal motive for writing the work, the desire of giving instruction, Dante himself alleges another--the fear of infamy, _timore d’infamia_ (_Conv._ i. 2): “I fear the infamy of having followed such great passion as whoso reads the above-mentioned canzoni will conceive to have held sway over me; the which infamy ceases entirely by the present speaking of myself, which shows that not passion, but virtue, has been the moving cause.” It would seem that Dante intended to comment upon certain of the canzoni connected with real women, and to represent them as allegorical; it may be that, consumed with a more than Shelleyan passion for reforming the world, he chose this method of getting rid of certain episodes in the past which he, with too much self-severity, regarded as rendering him unworthy of the sublime office he had undertaken. And, by a work of lofty style and authority, he would rehabilitate the man who, in his exiled wanderings, had “perchance cheapened himself more than truth wills” (i. 4).