This unfortunate lady was the bride of Nello della Pietra, a grandee of Siena, who, becoming jealous of her, removed his predestined victim to the putrid marshes of Maremma, where she soon drooped and died, without suspicion on her part, or intimation on his, of the hideous purpose for which she had been hurried thither; her gloomy keeper, with a dreadful eye, watching her life go out like a lamp in a charnel-vault, and after her death abandoning himself to despair.--One of Dante's sons above mentioned (Pietro) was an eminent lawyer at Verona, and enjoyed the friendship of Petrarch, who dedicated some lines to him, at Trevizi, in 1361. Jacopo is said to have been a writer of Italian verse. Of three others, almost nothing is known, except that they died young. His daughter Beatrice, so named after his _first_ love, took the veil in the convent of St. Stefano del' Uliva, at Ravenna. Dante was the author of two Latin treatises,--the one already noticed, "De Monarchia;" and another, "De Vulgari Eloquio," on the structure of language in general, and that of Italy in particular. But for his celebrity he is indebted solely to his productions in the latter tongue, consisting of "La Vita Nuova," a reverie of fact and fable, in prose and rhyme, referring to his youthful love;--"Canzoni[19] and Sonnets" of which his lady was the eternal theme;--"Il Convito," a critical and mystical commentary on three of his lyrics;--and the "Divina Commedia, or Vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise," by the glory of which its forerunners have been at once eclipsed and kept in mid-day splendour, instead of glimmering through that doubtful twilight of obscure fame among the feeble productions of contemporaries, which must have been their lot but for such fortunate alliance. The prose of the "Vita Nuova" and the "Convito" is deemed, at this day, not only nervous and racy, but in a high degree pure and elegant Italian; while much greater praise may be unhesitatingly bestowed upon his verse. Whether employed upon the arbitrary structure of Canzoni, the love-knot form of the sonnet, or the interminable chain of _terze rime_, (the triple intertwisted rhyme of the "Divina Commedia," which Dante is supposed to have invented,) his language is not more antiquated to his countrymen than the English of Shakspeare is to ours. The limits of the present essay preclude further notice of his lyrics than the general remark, that they have all the stately, brief, sententious character of his heroics, with occasional strokes of natural tenderness, and not unfrequently exhibit a delicacy of thought so pure, graceful, and unaffected, that Petrarch himself has seldom reached it in his more ornate and laboured compositions.