When we pass from portraiture to written record, we have but little material that is really _à propos_ in the early biographers of Dante. Boccaccio, after pourtraying his character and features says, “his expression was ever melancholy and thoughtful”—“nella faccia sempre malinconico e pensoso” (_Vita_, § 8), but goes on to describe him as “smiling a little”—“sorridendo alquanto” (_ib._), when he overheard the gossips of Verona commenting on the crisped hair and darkened complexion of the man who “goes down to Hell and returns at will to bring back word of those below.” Later on in his biography he draws out with evident relish the power of the poet’s sarcastic satire: “with a fine resourcefulness of invention,” says Boccaccio (§ 17), “he fixes his fangs on the vices of many yet alive and lashes the vices of many that have passed away”—“con invenzione acerbissima morde le colpe di molti viventi e quelle de’ preteriti castiga.” And speaking, in an earlier passage, of his courtesy in intercourse with others[107]—“più che alcun altro cortese e civile”—he takes something of the edge off Giovanni Villani’s description of a man “somewhat haughty, reserved and disdainful, and after the fashion of a philosopher, careless of graces and not easy in his intercourse with laymen.”[108] Yet we feel all the time that Villani’s description is, speaking broadly, the more convincing; and are relieved when we realise that it is the outwardly and obviously genial temperament rather than the saving sense of humour that the Florentine historian would deny to his great contemporary. Next, before we turn to the testimony of Dante’s own works, we may refer briefly to the stories told of him; for if none of these be incontrovertibly authentic, and not a few of them be comparatively late in origin, their cumulative evidence should be of some value, at any rate in suggesting what his own countrymen of succeeding generations regarded as compatible with the Poet’s temperament.[109] We may dismiss, if we will, as apocryphal, the tale of Dante’s conversation with the fish at the Venetian Doge’s banquet, and of the smearing of his court dress at King Robert’s feast, we may reject, perhaps, with more hesitation and regret, Sacchetti’s stories of the harmonious but offending blacksmith and the donkey-driver who farced Dante’s songs with an interpolated _Arrhi!_ We may relinquish the pun on Can Grande’s name, while retaining Petrarca’s story (of which Michele Savonarola’s is possibly a “doublet”) wherein Dante administers a deserved rebuke to Can Grande and his court for their preference of a buffoon to a poet. But even the rejected legends add their quota of testimony to the general and traditional belief that the Divino Poeta could unbend, and was capable of making a joke. And there is a certain residuum—some would say larger, some smaller—of anecdotes that may be believed to contain a nucleus of truth.