EPISTLES VII.*, VII.** AND VII.***.--These three letters are a humble pendant to the three just considered. They are addressed to Margaret of Brabant, the wife of the Emperor Henry, in the name of the Countess of Battifolle (Gherardesca, daughter of Count Ugolino, married to Guido di Simone of the Conti Guidi). They are in answer to letters from the Empress, and, while containing mere expressions of loyal devotion and aspirations for the triumph of the imperial cause, their place in the Vatican MS. among the letters of Dante, together with the close resemblance in style and phraseology with the latter, has led to a general acceptance of the view that they were written by the poet. They were written in the spring of 1311, the third being dated from Poppi on May 18th. EPISTLE VIII.--The letter to the Italian Cardinals, which is mentioned by Villani, and echoed by Petrarch in his canzone on Rome (“Spirto gentil che quelle membra reggi”), is found only in Boccaccio’s autograph manuscript. It was written shortly after the death of Clement V. (April 20, 1314), when the cardinals were assembled in conclave at Carpentras; lamenting the desolation of the sacred city, it exhorts them, “for the bride of Christ, for the seat of the bride, which is Rome, for our Italy, and, to speak more fully, for the whole estate of those on pilgrimage on earth,” to restore the Apostolic See to its consecrated place. It is a noble protest of a devout and learned layman against a corrupt and ignorant clergy, of a Catholic and an Italian patriot against the papal desertion of Rome, in which Dante stands forth as the new Jeremiah, renewing for the sacred city of Christendom the lamentation of his Hebrew predecessor for Jerusalem. The letter presents striking analogies with the canto of the simonist popes (_Inf._ xix.), but is more moderate in tone, as the poet is here less denouncing than attempting to convert the cardinals to his point of view. There is extant a letter to the French King from Cardinal Napoleone Orsini (whom Dante admonishes by name in the epistle) with passages of a somewhat similar kind; it is tempting to suppose that the cardinal had actually received the exhortation and caught fire from the burning words of his fellow Italian.