These two Eclogues are of priceless value. Nowhere else is such a comparatively bright picture of Dante’s closing days given us. The genuine and hearty laughter which greets Giovanni’s two letters, the generous tone of the supreme singer towards the young scholar poet, the kindly joking at the expense of Dino, make delightful reading and show us quite another side of Dante’s character. Giovanni’s first letter implies that the earlier parts of the _Commedia_ had not only been published, but had acquired a certain popularity. From Dante’s first Eclogue it follows that, by 1319, both _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_ were completed, and that the _Paradiso_ was in preparation: “When the bodies that flow round the world, and they that dwell among the stars, shall be shown forth in my song, even as the lower realms, then shall I delight to crown my head with ivy and with laurel.” And after this the passage in the second Eclogue, written apparently in 1321, however we interpret it, has the same pathos and sanctity as Petrarch’s note on the last line of his _Triumph of Eternity_, or the abrupt ending of Shelley’s _Triumph of Life_: Hoc illustre caput, cui iam frondator in alta virgine perpetuas festinat cernere frondes.[27] 5. _The “Quaestio de Aqua et Terra”_ The _Quaestio de Aqua et Terra_--which purports to be a discourse or lecture delivered by Dante in the church of Sant’ Elena at Verona on January 20th, 1320--was first published in 1508 by an Augustinian friar, Giovan Benedetto Moncetti. No manuscript of it is known to exist, and there is no reference to the work or to the event in any earlier writer, though Antonio Pucci (after the middle of the fourteenth century) implies that Dante sought disputations of this kind. In this work the poet--in accordance with the physical science of his age--discusses the question of the relative position of the element earth and the element water upon the surface of the globe. The _Quaestio_ was until recently regarded as a fabrication of the early sixteenth century, but Moore in England and Vincenzo Biagi in Italy, mainly on the internal evidence of the work itself, have convinced many Dante scholars that it may be regarded with some probability as authentic. FOOTNOTES: [19] In the recently discovered codex at Berlin--the earliest of the four extant MSS.--the work is entitled _Rectorica Dantis_ (“The Rhetoric of Dante”), which would associate it with the similarly named treatises of the masters of the _ars dictandi_, such as Boncompagno da Signa, who wrote a _Rhetorica novissima_. [20] This southern idiom (_nostrum ydioma_, i. 10)--from which Dante apparently regards both classical Latin and the modern romance languages derived--would be what we now call Vulgar Latin; but he restricts the phrase _vulgare latinum_ (or _latium_) to Italian, which--when discussing the rival claims of the three vernaculars to pre-eminence--he rightly recognises to be closest to classical Latin.