What are we to say of the _Trattato II_? Here, if anywhere, Dante poses as the unconscious humorist; here, if anywhere, in his elaborately solemn disquisition upon arrangement of the heavens and their analogues in the _trivium_ and _quadrivium_, he is qualifying himself to play the _rôle_ of St. Gregory in the other world! But even here he finds leisure to cast occasionally a satirist’s eye on the contemporary world— l’ aiuolo che ci fa tanto feroci; and the naïveté of his references to it is delightful. They sometimes come in incidentally in the form of similes. In Chapter vii.,[146] for instance, is an illusion to the perennial banishments and sieges with which the factions of Guelf and Ghibelline, Black and White, harassed the cities of the peninsula: “When we speak of ‘the city,’” he says, “we are wont to mean those who are in possession of it, not those who are attacking it, albeit the one and the other be citizens.” Or again, in Chapter xi.,[147] a reference to the decline of good taste and culture is ingeniously worked into a question of etymology. “_Cortesia_” is equivalent to “_onestade_,” and “because in courts of old time virtuous and fair manners were in use (as now the contrary), this word was derived from courts, and ‘courtesy’ was as much as to say ‘after the usage of courts.’ If the word had been derived in modern days from the same origin, it could have signified nothing else than _turpezza_.” In _Tratt. III_, as elsewhere, the playfulness is for the most part so spread out that it is difficult to quote. There is, however, a touch of real satire in such passages as that in which Dante twits the lawyers, physicians, and members of religious orders with their disqualification for the reputation of a true philosopher.[148] “We are not to call him a real philosopher who is a friend of wisdom for profit’s sake, as are lawyers, physicians, and almost all the members of the religious orders, who do not study in order to know, but in order to get money or office; and if any one would give them that which it is their purpose to acquire, they would linger over their study no longer.” _Trattato IV_ is more obviously fruitful. Here again he girds at the lawyers and doctors, suggesting that they might at least give _un_professional advice gratis, and, in another place, ventures timidly to assert that it may be possible “to be religious though married.”[149] Again, in Ch. xvi., if _nobile_ simply meant _notus_, then the Obelisk of St. Peter would be the noblest stone on earth, and Asdente the cobbler (of whom Salimbene gives us so lively a sketch) would be noblest among the citizens of Parma.[150] Some arguments are so senseless, he says a little earlier, that they deserve to be answered not with a word, but with a knife. “Risponder si vorrebbe non colle parole ma col coltello a tanta bestialità.”[151]