And so he is his own law; he owns no tribunal of opinion or standard of taste, except among the great dead. He hears them exhort him to "let the world talk on--to stand like a tower unshaken by the winds."[58] He fears to be "a timid friend to truth," "--to lose life among those who shall call this present time antiquity."[59] He belongs to no party. He is his own arbiter of the beautiful and the becoming; his own judge over right and injustice, innocence and guilt. He has no followers to secure, no school to humour, no public to satisfy; nothing to guide him, and nothing to consult, nothing to bind him, nothing to fear, out of himself. In full trust in heart and will, in his sense of truth, in his teeming brain, he gives himself free course. If men have idolised the worthless, and canonised the base, he reverses their award without mercy, and without apology; if they have forgotten the just because he was obscure, he remembers him: if "Monna Berta and Ser Martino,"[60] the wimpled and hooded gossips of the day, with their sage company, have settled it to their own satisfaction that Providence cannot swerve from their general rules, cannot save where they have doomed, or reject where they have approved--he both fears more and hopes more. Deeply reverent to the judgment of the ages past, reverent to the persons whom they have immortalised for good and even for evil, in his own day he cares for no man's person and no man's judgment. And he shrinks not from the auguries and forecastings of his mind about their career and fate. Men reasoned rapidly in those days on such subjects, and without much scruple; but not with such deliberate and discriminating sternness. The most popular and honoured names in Florence, Farinata e 'l Tegghiaio, che fur sì degni, Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, e 'l Mosca E gli altri, ch'a ben far poser gl'ingegni; have yet the damning brand: no reader of the _Inferno_ can have forgotten the shock of that terrible reply to the poet's questionings about their fate: Ei son tra le anime più nere.[61] [Footnote 58: _Purg._ 5.] [Footnote 59: