"we should feel truly; but not, as Corinne did, heartbreakingly." If Goldsmith did grumble, he had bitter cause. At one time having pawned everything that would bring money, he resorted to writing ballads at five shillings apiece, going out secretly in the evening to hear them sung in the streets. His five shillings were often shared with some importunate beggar. One day he gave away his bed-clothes to a poor woman who had none; and then, feeling cold at night, he ripped open his bed and was found lying up to his chin in the feathers! The very name of Goldsmith seems to us to ring with a generous tone of unselfishness and human sympathy. The story is true of his leaving the card-table to relieve a poor woman whose voice as she sang some ditty in passing on the street came to his sensitive ear indicating distress. Not a line can be found in all his productions where he has written severely against any one, though he was himself the subject of bitter criticism and literary abuse. He was not a very thorough reader of books, but owed his ability as a writer more to the keenness of his observation. Nature and life were the books he studied; which was simply going to the fountain-head for his information. Machiavelli, the renowned Italian statesman, philosopher, and dramatist, whose picturesque history of Florence alone would have entitled him to fame, was entirely misconstrued by the times in which he lived, suffering imprisonment, torture, and banishment in the cause of public liberty. Macaulay says of him: "The name of a man whose genius has illumined all the dark places of policy, and to whose patriotic wisdom an oppressed people owed their last chance of emancipation, passed into a proverb of infamy." The victim of one age often becomes the idol of the next. Dante,[115] expatriated, and exiled from wife and children, is not forgotten. The greatest genius between the Augustan and Elizabethan ages, an accomplished musician, a painter of no mean repute, and a brilliant scholar, he yet enjoyed no contemporary fame. "The inventor of the spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his reward in his own day," says Carlyle; "but the writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary." Dante poured out the deep devotion of his youthful heart at the feet of that Beatrice whose name he has rendered classic by the genius of his pen, though she did not live to bless him. His later marriage was ill-assorted and unhappy. The sublime and unique "Divine Comedy" was not even published until after its author's death. Now the pilgrim bends with reverence over the grave whither he was hurried by persecution. How absurd are the transitions of which human appreciation is capable! Even the cool, philosophical Carlyle was struck with admiration of the poet's devotion. He says: "I know not in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love, like the wail of