It was the purpose of Guido da Polenta to erect a gorgeous sepulchre over the ashes of the poet; but he neither reigned nor lived to accomplish this, being soon afterwards driven from his dominions, and dying himself a banished man at Bologna. More than a hundred and fifty years later, Bernardo Bembo, father of the famous cardinal, completed Polenta's design, though upon an inferior scale; and three centuries more had elapsed, when cardinal Gonzaga raised a second and far more sumptuous monument in the same place,--Ravenna; while in Florence, to this day, there is none worthy of itself or the poet, who had been in turn "its glory and its shame." The greatest honours conferred on his memory by his native city were, the restoration to his family of his confiscated property, after a lapse of forty years, the erection of a bust crowned with laurel, at the public expense, a present from the state of ten golden florins to his daughter by the hands of Boccaccio, and the appointment of a public lecturer to expound the mysteries of the "Divina Commedia." Boccaccio was the first professor who filled this chair of poetry, philosophy, and theology. He commenced his dissertations on a Sunday, in the church of St. Stephen, but died at the end of two years, having proceeded no further than the seventeenth Canto of the "Inferno." Similar institutions were adopted in Bologna, Pisa, Venice, and other Italian towns; so that the renown of the man who had lived by sufferance, died an outlaw, and been indebted to strangers for a grave, exceeded, within two centuries, that of all his countrymen who in polite literature had gone before him, and became the load-star of all who, in any age, should follow. At Rome only the memory of the Ghibelline bard was execrated, and his writings were proscribed. His book "De Monarchia" was publicly burnt there, by order of pope John XXII., who also sent a cardinal to the successor of Guido da Polenta, to demand his bones, that they might be dealt with as those of an heretic, and the ashes scattered on the wind. How impotent is the vengeance of the great after the death of the object of their displeasure! What a refuge, especially to fame, is the grave; a sanctuary which can never be violated; for all human passions die on its threshold!