has often been quoted as referring, with indirect bitterness, to his own miserable union with a firebrand of a woman: yet, in no passage throughout the whole of his long poem, does Dante cast the slightest shade upon her character; though, with the frankness of honest censure or undisguised resentment, he spares nobody else, friend or foe, in the distribution of what he deemed impartial justice. One thing is exceedingly in favour of his own amiable and affectionate nature, in the nearest connections of life: whenever he mentions children in his similes (and he mentions them often), it is always with exquisite delicacy or endearing playfulness; while, in the tenderest tones, he descants on their beauty, their innocence, their sports, and their sufferings. Mothers, too, are among the loveliest objects which he presents in those sweet interludes of real life which he delights to bring in, and does so with consummate address, to relieve the horrors of the infernal pit, the wearying pains of purgatory, and the insufferable glories of Paradise. Concerning Dante's wife it may therefore be fairly presumed, that she was less of either termagant or tormentor than has been generally imagined by his over-zealous editors. The petulance of Boccaccio and the gravity of Aretino (two of his earliest biographers) on this subject are ludicrously contrasted. The former affects to be quite shocked at the idea of the sublime and contemplative poet being forced to lead the dull household life of other men, and submit to certain petty annoyances of daily occurrence.--On these he expatiates most pathetically, as things which _might have been_, though he fairly acknowledges that he does not know that any of them _were_, the causes of long unhappiness and final separation between the parties. Aretino, on the other hand, in sober sadness (without any reference to the ill qualities of either), justifies Dante for condescending to be married, on the ground that many illustrious philosophers, including Socrates, the greatest of all, were husbands and fathers, and held offices of state, in perfect compatibility with their intellectual pursuits!