theology, and his masterly handling of language and rhetoric is such that it would be difficult to find equal beauty of style even in the greatest writers. With him the laws, manners, tongues, the history of all nations, shine like stars in the firmament with such majesty that no one can equal him in this respect, far less surpass him. Wherefore do I say all this? That my eagerness to obtain a correct text may cause thee less astonishment.’ This enthusiasm for Dante—an enthusiasm which one cannot but feel was less for the poet than for the man who had mastered more than any other all the learning of his time—was, however, by no means shared by all the learned men of the fifteenth century, whose threshold Coluccio barely crossed. Niccolò Niccoli, by his attacks on his great countryman, exposed himself to obloquy from which he never recovered; though it must not be forgotten that the words in which Niccoli calls Dante’s book reading for cobblers and bakers are only found in a writing of Leonardo Bruni, who was just as excitable as Niccoli himself. Niccoli’s rage seems to have been especially excited by the unclassical Latin in Dante’s letters; but the reproach which he brings against Dante, that he knew nothing of classical literature, and drew all his information from monkish compendiums—a reproach which, strangely enough, he also applies to Petrarca and Boccaccio[14]—resembles other tokens of the pride of the humanistic school too strongly to be seriously examined. The lecture given at the end of 1430 by Francesco Filelfo against the censurers of Dante, and the controversial treatise composed for the same object by Cino Rinuccini, father of Alamanno, are sufficiently clear proofs how false was the judgment of many. Filelfo himself declared, more than forty years later, that he undertook the public exposition of the ‘Divine Comedy’ of his own accord, and in deference to a general wish.[15] About the close of the fourteenth century Filippo Villani wrote a short life of Dante; a longer biography came out in 1436 written by Leonardo Bruni; twenty years later he was followed by Gianozzo Manetti. Not long after the latter, Gian Maria Filelfo, Francesco’s son, who had many opportunities of acquiring information from the poet’s descendants living in Verona, wrote a new biography which he dedicated to Pietro Alighieri, and which the latter sent, at the end of 1467, to Piero de’ Medici and Tommaso Soderini.[16] The erection in Sta. Maria del Fiore of a monument in the shape of the poet’s statue was decreed in 1465. Ten years later, the picture painted by Domenico di Michelino was placed in the north aisle of the church.[17] In literature the great poet’s countrymen had wandered far away from the path which he had pointed out; but they guarded his memory faithfully, and the beautiful manuscripts which appeared about the middle of the fifteenth century, shortly before the introduction of printing, prove how much his work was held in honour.