Dante's last and most magnanimous patron was Guido Novello da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, who was himself a poet, and a munificent benefactor of men of letters. This nobleman was the father of Francesca di Rimini, whose fatal love has given her a place on the most splendid page of the "Divina Commedia;" no other episode being told with equal beauty and pathos: yet so brief and simple is the narrative, that, even if the circumstances were as unexceptionably pure as they are insidiously delicate, translation ought hardly to be attempted; for the labour would be fruitless. Dante himself could not have given his masterpiece in precisely corresponding terms in another language; though, had any other been his own, it need not be doubted that in it he would have found words to tell his tale as well. It is not what a poet finds a language to be, but what he makes it, that constitutes the charm, not to be imitated, of his style. This is the despair of translators, though few seem to have suspected the existence of such a secret. The mental sufferings of the poet during his nineteen years of banishment, ending in death, oftener find utterance, through his writings, in bitter invectives and prophetic denunciations against his enemies and traducers, than in strains of lamentation; yet would his wounds bleed afresh, and the anguish of his spirit be renewed with all the tenderness of wronged but passionate attachment, at every endeared recollection of the land of his nativity;--the city where he had been cradled and had grown up--where Beatrice was born, beloved, and buried--where he had himself attained the highest honours of the state, and, in his own esteem, deserved the lasting gratitude of his fellow-citizens, instead of experiencing their implacable hatred. Haughty yet humbled, vindictive yet forgiving, it is manifest, even in his darkest moods, that his heart yearned for reconciliation; that he pined in home-sickness wherever he went, and would gladly have renounced all his wrath, and submitted to any self-denial consistent with honour, to be received back into his country. For, much as he loved the latter,--nay, madly as he loved it in his paroxysms of exasperation,--he wrapt himself up tighter in the mantle of his integrity as the storm raged more vehemently; and, as the conflict went harder against him, grasped his honour, like his sword, never to be surrendered but with life: to preserve these, he submitted to lose all beside.