If with Witte we go on to enquire how far Young Italy is justified in fathering upon Dante the passion of “hatred of the foreign, and above all of the Teuton yoke,” the question is at once confused by the fact that in Dante’s day the authority and prestige of that Holy Roman Empire, of which the Poet was so convinced and so enthusiastic an advocate, was associated with a succession of German princes. Teutons of the Swabian House of Hohenstaufen, albeit Italian born, were “the illustrious heroes Frederic the Caesar and his well-begotten Manfred” whom in the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ (I. xii. 20; Bemp. p. 330) he extols for their nurture, in the Sicilian Court, of the beginnings of Italian vernacular poetry; Teutons the Rudolf and Albert of Hapsburg, to whom the poet of the _Divine Comedy_ looks in vain for the liberation of Italy from its overwhelming ills; Teuton also Henry of Luxemburg, on whom his hopes were finally fixed, the “Alto Arrigo” of the _Paradiso_— ... Ch’ a drizzare Italia Verrà in prima ch’ ella sia disposta, for whom he sees a vacant throne prepared in the White Rose of heaven.[25] These heroes are not for him, however, Germans, _Tedeschi_, but Roman Caesars; and had the sceptre of Empire chanced, then, as afterwards, to have been wielded by other hands, we cannot doubt that a non-Teutonic line of monarchs would have drawn from him a like reverence, a like expectation and a like passionate appeal. Similarly, had the House of Swabia been dissociated from the Roman Imperial tradition and played a _rôle_ of overweening and unscrupulous self-aggrandisement like that actually played by Philippe le Bel, Hugh Capet’s words in the fifth Cornice of _Purgatory_—so well applied by a recent writer in the _Times_ to the Hohenzollern—would have been put into the mouth of an ancestor of the two Frederics, and applied to the House of Hohenstaufen. “I was the root,” he says, “of the evil plant whose shadow blights the whole land of Christendom”—[26] Io fui radice de la mala pianta, Che la terra cristiana tutta aduggia. There is indeed one passage at least where Dante mentions the German people in a non-political context (_Inf._ xvii. 21), and designates them from the point of view of their national or racial habits. _Tedeschi lurchi_—“Guzzling Germans”—he calls them. How one’s heart goes out to him, as one recalls memories of sojourns in Swiss hotels! Had poor Dante like experiences or worse to put up with in the days of his wanderings? Witte, who spontaneously brings forward this word of insight into national character, is delightfully frank about it. “Only in one place,” he says, “does he accuse us of a weakness which we would fain repudiate, but it has been laid to the charge of Germany down even to our own day, on so many hands, that we cannot escape the fear that our forefathers at least must have given grounds for the accusation.” ...