council-hall, in that mind of exquisite and, as drawn by itself, exaggerated sensibility. The doings and characters of men, the workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were watched and thought of with as deep an interest as the courses of the stars, and read in the real spectacle of life with as profound emotion as in the miraculous page of Virgil; and no scholar ever read Virgil with such feeling--no astronomer ever watched the stars with more eager inquisitiveness. The whole man opens to the world around him; all affections and powers, soul and sense, diligently and thoughtfully directed and trained, with free and concurrent and equal energy, with distinct yet harmonious purposes, seek out their respective and appropriate objects, moral, intellectual, natural, spiritual, in that admirable scene and hard field where man is placed to labour and love, to be exercised, proved, and judged. [Footnote 24: _Vide_ the opening of the _De Monarchia_.] In a fresco in the chapel of the old palace of the Podestà[25] at Florence is a portrait of Dante, said to be by the hand of his contemporary Giotto. It was discovered in 1841 under the whitewash, and a tracing made by Mr. Seymour Kirkup has been reproduced in fac-simile by the Arundel Society. The fresco was afterwards restored or repainted with no happy success. He is represented as he might have been in the year of Campaldino (1289). The countenance is youthful yet manly, more manly than it appears in the engravings of the picture; but it only suggests the strong deep features of the well-known traditional face. He is drawn with much of the softness, and melancholy pensive sweetness, and with something also of the quaint stiffness of the _Vita Nuova_--with his flower and his book. With him is drawn his master, Brunetto Latini,[26] and Corso Donati. We do not know what occasion led Giotto thus to associate him with the great "Baron." Dante was, indeed, closely connected with the Donati. The dwelling of his family was near theirs, in the "Quarter of Scandal," the Ward of the Porta S. Piero. He married a daughter of their house, Madonna Gemma. None of his friends are commemorated with more affection than the companion of his light and wayward days, remembered not without a shade of anxious sadness, yet with love and hope, Corso's brother, Forese.[27] No sweeter spirit sings and smiles in the illumined spheres of Paradise, than she whom Forese remembers as on earth one, Che tra bella e buona Non so qual fosse più--[28]