Finally he resolved to go to Rome. But the blindness or corruption of the Papal Court was invincible; and while Dante was still toiling at his hopeless task, Charles of Valois entered Florence with his troops, soon to realise the worst suspicions of those who had opposed his intervention. Nominally a restorer of tranquillity, he stirred up all the worst and most lawless passions of the Florentines; and while Dante was serving his country at Rome, the unjust and cruel sentence of banishment was launched against him, his property was confiscated and seized, a few months afterwards he was sentenced to be burned to death should he ever fall into the power of the Florentines, and, not content with all this, his enemies heaped upon his name the foulest calumnies of embezzlement and malversation--calumnies which I suppose no creature from that hour to this has ever for one moment believed, but which could not fail to make the envenomed wound strike deeper into Dante's heart. So now he must leave 'all things most dear--this the first arrow shot from exile's bow,' in poverty and dependence his proud spirit must learn 'how salt a taste cleaves to a patron's bread, how hard a path to tread a patron's stair;' and, above all, his unsullied purity and patriotism must find itself forced into constant association or even alliance with selfish and personal ambition, or with tyranny, meanness, and duplicity.[13] How that great soul bore itself amid all these miseries, what it learnt from them, where it sought and found a refuge from them, we shall see when we take up again the broken thread which we must drop to-day. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: _Vita Nuova_, xliii.] [Footnote 2: _Vita Nuova_, i, ii.] [Footnote 3: _Vita Nuova_, iii.; _Inferno_, xv. 55 sqq. &c.] [Footnote 4: _Vita Nuova_, iii.] [Footnote 5: _Vita Nuova_, iv-xxx.] [Footnote 6: _Convito_, iv. 23.] [Footnote 7: _Convito_, ii. 13.] [Footnote 8: _Vita Nuova_, xxxi-xliii.; _Convito_, ii.; _Purgatorio_, xxx, xxxi.] [Footnote 9: _Inferno_, xxxiv. 55-67.] [Footnote 10: See the _De Monarchia_. Compare _Purgatorio_, xvi. 103-112; _Paradiso_, xviii. 124-136.] [Footnote 11: _Inferno_, iii. 22-51.] [Footnote 12: Compare _Inferno_, x. 52-72, 109-111.] [Footnote 13: _Paradiso_, xvii. 55-63.] II DANTE'S LIFE AND PRINCIPLES _II. IN EXILE_ A rapid sketch of the most decisive events and the leading motives of the life of Dante Alighieri has brought us to the eventful period of his Priorate in 1300 and his banishment in 1302. His unsuccessful efforts to carry out a firm and statesmanlike policy in Florence, with the wreck of his own fortunes consequent upon their failure, may be regarded as the occasion if not the cause of his conceiving his greatest work, the 'Divine Comedy.'