[422] _My lay_: See previous note. Dante thus indirectly acknowledges his debt to Virgil; and, perhaps, at the same time puts in his claim to an imaginative licence equal to that taken by his master. On a modern reader the effect of the reference is to weaken the verisimilitude of the incident. [423] _For I am he, etc._: The speaker is Pier delle Vigne, who from being a begging student of Bologna rose to be the Chancellor of the Emperor Frederick II., the chief councillor of that monarch, and one of the brightest ornaments of his intellectual court. Peter was perhaps the more endeared to his master because, like him, he was a poet of no mean order. There are two accounts of what caused his disgrace. According to one of these he was found to have betrayed Frederick's interests in favour of the Pope's; and according to the other he tried to poison him. Neither is it known whether he committed suicide; though he is said to have done so after being disgraced, by dashing his brains out against a church wall in Pisa. Dante clearly follows this legend. The whole episode is eloquent of the esteem in which Peter's memory was held by Dante. His name is not mentioned in Inferno, but yet the promise is amply kept that it shall flourish on earth again, freed from unmerited disgrace. He died about 1249. [424] _The harlot_: Envy. [425] _Of what thou thinkest, etc._: Virgil never asks a question for his own satisfaction. He knows who the spirits are, what brought them there, and which of them will speak honestly out on the promise of having his fame refreshed in the world. It should be noted how, by a hint, he has made Peter aware of who he is (line 48); a delicate attention yielded to no other shade in the Inferno, except Ulysses (_Inf._ xxvi. 79), and, perhaps, Brunetto Latini (_Inf._ xv. 99). [426] _In them shall ne'er be clad_: Boccaccio is here at great pains to save Dante from a charge of contradicting the tenet of the resurrection of the flesh. [427] _Naked_: These are the prodigals; their nakedness representing the state to which in life they had reduced themselves. [428] _Lano_: Who made one of a club of prodigals in Siena (_Inf._ xxix. 130) and soon ran through his fortune. Joining in a Florentine expedition in 1288 against Arezzo, he refused to escape from a defeat encountered by his side at Pieve del Toppo, preferring, as was supposed, to end his life at once rather than drag it out in poverty. [429] _James of St. Andrews_: Jacopo da Sant' Andrea, a Paduan who inherited enormous wealth which did not last him for long. He literally threw money away, and would burn a house for the sake of the blaze. His death has been placed in 1239.