The importance ascribed by Dante’s contemporaries to his writings other than the famous poem is well illustrated in the comment of the historian Giovanni Villani who, commenting on the death and burial of Dante, says: “This was a great and learned person in almost every science, although a layman; he was a consummate poet and philosopher and rhetorician; as perfect in prose and verse as he was in public speaking a most noble orator; in rhyming excellent, with the most polished and beautiful style that ever appeared in our language up to his time or since. He wrote in his youth the book of _The Early Life of Love_, and afterwards when in exile made twenty moral and amorous canzonets very excellent, and amongst other things three noble epistles; one he sent to the Florentine government complaining of his undeserved exile; another to the emperor Henry when he was at the siege of Brescia, reprehending him for his delay and almost prophesying; the third to the Italian cardinals during the vacancy after the death of Pope Clement, urging them to agree in electing an Italian pope--all in Latin, with noble precepts and excellent sentences and authorities, which were much commended by the wise and learned. And he wrote the _Commedia_ where, in polished verse and with great and subtile arguments, moral, natural, astrological, philosophical, and theological, with new and beautiful figures, similes, and poetical graces, he composed and treated in a hundred chapters, or cantos, of the existence of hell, purgatory, and paradise, so loftily as may be said of it that whoever is of subtile intellect may by his said treatise perceive and understand. He was well pleased in this poem to blame and cry out in the manner of poets, in some places perhaps more than he ought to have done; but it may be that his exile made him do so. He also wrote the _Monarchia_, where he treats of the office of popes and emperors. And he began a comment on fourteen of the above-named moral canzonets in the vulgar tongue, which in consequence of his death is found imperfect except on three, which to judge from what is seen would have proved a lofty, beautiful, subtile, and most important work, because it is equally ornamented with noble opinions and fine philosophical and astrological reasoning. Besides these he composed a little book which he entitled _De Vulgari Eloquentia_, of which he promised to make four books (but only two are to be found, perhaps in consequence of his early death), where in powerful and elegant Latin and good reasoning he rejects all the vulgar tongues of Italy.