took up one of the little fish in his hand and held it to his ear as though expecting it to say something. The doge observing this asked him what his strange behaviour meant. To which Dante replied: 'As I knew that the father of this fish met his death in these waters I was asking him news of his father.' "'Well,' said the doge, 'and what did he answer?' Dante replied: 'He told me that he and his companions were too little to remember much about him; but that I might learn what I wanted to know from the older fish, who would be able to give me the news I asked for.' "Thereupon the doge at once ordered Dante to be served with a fine large fish." [Illustration: Colour Plate S. GIOVANNI BATTISTA] Thus Dante called attention to his great achievement, by which I suppose he hoped at once to vindicate his dignity as a great man, certainly greater than any one present, and by this means to lend importance to his mission. Whatever may have been the personal result of his sally, it did his mission no good at all. When the official interview took place Dante, if we may believe something of the apocryphal "Letter of Dante to Guido da Polenta," began to address the doge in Latin and was bidden to speak in Italian or to obtain an interpreter. His mission was a failure and Venice, who in the person of her doge did her best to show either her ignorance of the great poet who did her the honour of crossing her Piazza or of her philistine contempt of him, lives in the _Divine Comedy_ only as an illustration of Hell. "Thus we from bridge to bridge ... Pass'd on, and to the summit reaching, stood To view another gap, within the round Of Malebolge, other bootless pangs. Marvellous darkness shadow'd o'er the place. In the Venetian arsenal as boils Through wintry months tenacious pitch, to smear Their unbound vessels ... So not by force of fire but art divine Boiled here a glutinous thick mass, that round Limed all the shore." On his way back to Ravenna by land, for the Venetians added to their shame by refusing him the sea passage, he caught a fever in the marshes and returned to Ravenna only to die: the mightiest of all those--emperors and kings--who lie in that "_generale sepolcro di santissimi corpi_."