And what difference did that make to Venice? It made this difference--that whereas she had been the gate from the East, the port by which the riches and products of the East came into the Western world, this discovery that man could go sailing eastward, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, meant {227} the opening of a new door through which those rich products could be brought to Western Europe. And it was a more convenient way of bringing them, because it did not require all the old long overland travel, perhaps from India through Asia Minor, and then the putting of the merchandise on shipboard to be carried to Venice, and then again the unshipping at Venice and the overland carriage again. This overland route was one way. Another was by way of ports on the Red Sea and thence across the Isthmus of Suez to the Mediterranean. Instead of all this complicated business, there might now be the one shipping in some port, say of India, and the unshipping, perhaps in Lisbon. [Sidenote: India and America] Thus the East was opened to the West, and almost at the same moment a new and further West was opened with the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (after whom that great land is sometimes called Columbia) and by that Vespucci, whose baptismal name was Amerigo, after whom it is more commonly called. Thus immensely, in two opposite directions, was the scene of the great story extended. And the discoveries to which men's minds were turned were not only those about the geography of the world they lived in, and the way in which its continents and its seas were shaped. Their minds began to turn with a new interest to art, to learning and to the beauty of the world. All through this great story we have seen how wonderfully Rome, in spite of perpetual changes in her government and continual fighting between the various parties trying to get the upper hand, led the world, at one time dominating all by the organisation of her Empire, at another bending the spirits of men and directing their actions by the influence of the Church. {228} All over Italy, for many a century, the like contentions and changes in government were frequent, and it was in the very midst of the turbulence and of the fighting of city against city that Dante, greatest of Italian poets, and among the very greatest of all time, came into fame and wrote his "Divine Comedy." He was chief magistrate of Florence in 1300, born of {229} a family that favoured the Guelphs and married to a lady of a family very strongly disposed to the Ghibellines. So he had his full share in the troubles of the times. [Illustration: COLUMBUS.] Second only to him among the poets of Italy was Petrarch, his disciple. Petrarch is famous as the inventor of the "sonnet" form of verse. He was a student of the ancient classical literature of which the very existence seems to have been almost forgotten since the inroads of the Goths.