itself, after the campaign of a few days, was abandoned altogether. Dante, according to general belief, accompanied this unfortunate expedition; and so did Pietro Petracco, the father of the celebrated Petrarca (Petrarch), who had been expelled with the Bianchi from Florence; and it is stated, that on the very night on which the army of the exiles marched against the city, Petracco's wife Eletta gave birth to the poet who was to succeed Dante as the glory of his country's literature. After this miscarriage Dante quitted the confederacy, disgusted by the bickerings, jealousies, and bad faith of the heterogeneous and unmanageable multitude, which, common calamities had driven together, but could not cement by common interests. The poet refers to this motley and discordant crew in the latter lines of the celebrated passage, in which he represents his ancestor. Cacciaguida, as prophesying his future banishment with the miseries and mortifications which he should suffer from the ingratitude of his countrymen:-- "For thou must leave behind thee every thing Thine heart holds dearest.--This will be the first Shaft which the bow of exile shoots against thee: And thou must prove how salt the bread that's eaten At others' tables, and how hard the path To climb and to go down a stranger's stairs: But what shall weigh the heaviest on thy shoulders, Will be the base and evil company With which thy lot hath cast thee in that valley; For every thankless, lawless, reckless wretch Shall turn against thee:--yet confusion, soon, Of face shall cover them, not thee, with blushes; Their brutishness will be so manifest, That to have stood alone will be thy glory."[10] _Del Paradiso_, XVII. To the personal humiliations of which he chewed the cud in hitter secrecy, through years of heart-breaking dependence on the precarious bounty of others, there is a striking but forced allusion at the close of the eleventh canto of the "Purgatorio." Dante enquires concerning a proud spirit bent double under a huge burden of stones, which he is condemned to carry for as many years as he had lived, till he shall he sufficiently humbled to pass muster through the flames into Paradise. This is Provenzano Salvani, who for his acts of outrageous tyranny would have been doomed to a much harder penance, but for one good deed.--A friend of his being kept prisoner by Charles of Anjou, and threatened with death unless a ransom of 10,000 golden florins were paid for his freedom, Salvani so far degraded himself as to stand (to kneel, say some,) in the public market-place of Siena, with a carpet spread on the ground before him, imploring, with the cries and importunity of a common beggar, the charitable contributions of every passenger towards raising the required sum. This he accomplished, and his friend was saved.