And it is not easy to conceive a Ghibelline partisan putting into the mouth of Justinian, the type of law and empire, a general condemnation of his party as heavy as that of their antagonists;--the crime of having betrayed, as the Guelfs had resisted, the great symbol of public right-- Omai puoi giudicar di que' cotali Ch'io accusai di sopra, e de' lor falli Che son cagion di tutti i vostri mali. L'uno al pubblico segno i gigli gialli Oppone, e _quel s'appropria l'altro a parte_, Sì ch'è forte a veder qual più si falli. _Faccian li Ghibellin, faccian lor arte Sott'altro segno; chè mal segue quello Sempre chi la giustizia e lui diparte._[77] [Footnote 77: _Ibid._ 6.] And though, as the victim of the Guelfs of Florence, he found refuge among Ghibelline princes, he had friends among Guelfs also. His steps and his tongue were free to the end. And in character and feeling, in his austerity, his sturdiness and roughness, his intolerance of corruption and pride, his strongly-marked devotional temper, he was much less a Ghibelline than like one of those stern Guelfs who hailed Savonarola. But he had a very decided and complete political theory, which certainly was not Guelf; and, as parties then were, it was not much more Ghibelline. Most assuredly no set of men would have more vigorously resisted the attempt to realise his theory, would have joined more heartily with all immediate opponents--Guelfs, Black, White, and Green, or even Boniface VIII.,--to keep out such an emperor as Dante imagined, than the Ghibelline nobles and potentates. Dante's political views were a dream; though a dream based on what had been, and an anticipation of what was, in part at least, to come. It was a dream in the middle ages, in divided and republican Italy, the Italy of cities--of a real and national government, based on justice and law. It was the dream of a real _state_. He imagined that the Roman empire had been one great state; he persuaded himself that Christendom might be such. He was wrong in both instances; but in this case, as in so many others, he had already caught the spirit and ideas of a far-distant future; and the political organisation of modern times, so familiar to us that we cease to think of its exceeding wonder, is the practical confirmation, though in a form very different from what he imagined, of the depth and farsightedness of those expectations which are in outward form so chimerical--"_i miei non falsi errori_."