I were the Dog, you would not see so many bones’—‘Se fosse io il Can non si vedrebbe tante osse,’—meaning that, if he had been Cangrande, he would have had fewer and choicer companions at his table. “From the strength and glory of his position in Lombardy, Cangrande would appear to have been designated by Dante as the one man fitted to unite the entire peninsula of Italy under his own rule. This belief of Dante’s, according to many of his commentators, is expressed in what has become known as the ‘Veltro prophecy’ in the first Canto of the ‘Inferno,’ the passage where the poet, finding his way barred by the leopard—‘quella fera alla gaietta pelle,’—is saved from it by the shade of Virgil, who explains to him the pure character of the heart which, as he says, ‘is but the hungrier after banqueting.’ “And then the shade continues: “‘Many are the animals with which this beast doth mate, and there shall yet be others still, until the greyhound comes that is to make the beast die painfully. He (the greyhound) shall not feed on land or gold, but on wisdom and virtue and love. And his country shall lie between Feltro and Feltro; and he shall be the saviour of this lowly Italy.’ “And again, at perhaps the most disputed passage of the entire ‘Divina Commedia’ (Purgatorio, Canto XXXIII, line 46), Dante speaks of a mysterious personage who is to do great things and of whom he speaks as ‘A five hundred and ten and five sent by God’—‘Un cinquecento diece e cinque, messo di Dio’—which numerals, as is held by many, have reference to no other than Cangrande himself, and that the DXV of these numerals and the ‘Veltro’ of the former prophecy are only meant to signify one and the same person—the lord of Verona. “And, in fact, Cangrande became in 1313, on the death of Emperor Henry of Luxembourg, the natural leader of the Ghibellines and the mainstay of their hopes in Italy—for his was an united and a single authority in his dominions, whereas the rule of the Visconti in Milan—the other great Ghibelline centre—was as yet but feeble by comparison and very uncertain. From then until his death Cangrande devoted himself to furthering his pet project of a federation of Italian States under his own leadership—but without success. He came to his end at the untimely age of thirty-eight, July 22, 1329, as the effect, according to Mr. Ruskin, of ‘eating apples when he was too hot.’ By then Cangrande had compelled nine other cities besides Verona to pay yearly tribute to him as their sovereign lord—Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, Brescia, Feltre, Belluno, Parma, Modena, and Lucca—their collected addition to his revenues being, as Villani said, ‘more than 70,000 florins of gold, which no other Christian King possesses, unless it be the King of France.’”