Yet his sin, though pardoned, was to keep him for long years from the perfection of heaven.[63] And with the same independence with which he assigns their fate, he selects his instances--instances which are to be the types of character and its issues. No man ever owned more unreservedly the fascination of greatness, its sway over the imagination and the heart; no one prized more the grand harmony and sense of fitness which there is, when the great man and the great office are joined in one, and reflect each other's greatness. The famous and great of all ages are gathered in the poet's vision; the great names even of fable--Geryon and the giants, the Minotaur and Centaurs, and the heroes of Thebes and Troy. But not the great and famous only: this is too narrow, too conventional a sphere; it is not real enough. He felt, what the modern world feels so keenly, that wonderful histories are latent in the inconspicuous paths of life, in the fugitive incidents of the hour, among the persons whose faces we have seen. The Church had from the first been witness to the deep interest of individual life. The rising taste for novels showed that society at large was beginning to be alive to it. And it is this feeling--that behind the veil there may be grades of greatness but nothing insignificant--that led Dante to refuse to restrict himself to the characters of fame. He will associate with them the living men who have stood round him; they are part of the same company with the greatest. That they have interested him, touched him, moved his indignation or pity, struck him as examples of great vicissitude or of a perfect life, have pleased him, loved him--this is enough why they should live in his poem as they have lived to him. He chooses at will; history, if it has been negligent at the time about those whom he thought worthy of renown, must be content with its loss. He tells their story, or touches them with a word like the most familiar names, according as he pleases. The obscure highway robber, the obscure betrayer of his sister's honour--Rinier da Corneto and Rinier Pazzo, and Caccianimico--are ranked, not according to their obscurity, but according to the greatness of their crimes, with the famous conquerors, and "scourges of God," and seducers of the heroic age, Pyrrhus and Attila, and the great Jason of "royal port, who sheds no tear in his torments."[64] He earns as high praise from Virgil, for his curse on the furious wrath of the old frantic Florentine burgher, as if he had cursed the disturber of the world's peace.[65] And so in the realms of joy, among the faithful accomplishers of the highest trusts, kings and teachers of the nations, founders of orders, sainted empresses, appear those whom, though the world had forgotten or misread them, the poet had enshrined in his familiar thoughts, for their sweetness, their gentle goodness, their nobility of soul; the penitent, the nun, the old crusading ancestor, the pilgrim who had