The third characteristic of the age of Dante is its chivalry, which placed woman on the highest pedestal she had ever occupied. In literature that unique influence is seen in a new and an exalted conception of love. Love is now coupled with nobility of life. The troubadours had sung of love as a quality belonging to gentle folk, meaning by that phrase the nobility, and nobility had been defined by the Emperor Frederick II, patron of the troubadours, as a combination of ancestral wealth and fine manners. In the Banquet (bk. IV) Dante rejects that definition and transfers nobility from the social to the moral order holding that "nobility exists where virtue dwells." Love, the flowering of this nobility, may be found in the heart of him even lowest in the social scale provided that he is a virtuous man. It is not an affair solely of gentle blood. It has no pedigree of birth or richness. "In this sense the true lover need not be a _gentleman_ but he must be a _gentle man_, loving not by genteel code of caste but by gentle code of character." (J.B. Fletcher: Dante p. 27.) Thus Dante makes Guido Guinicelli say: "Love and the gentle heart are one and the same thing." And Dante himself in one of his Canzoni writes: "Let no man predicate That aught the name of gentleman should have Even in a king's estate Except the heart there be a gentle man's." Love, Then, Became In Literature Such A Refined Emotion That To Quote Dante: "It Makes Ill Thought To Perish, It Drives Into Foul Hearts A Deadly Chill" And On The Other Hand It Fills Indeed The Lover With Such Delicacy Of Sentiment For His Beloved That She Is His Inspiration To Virtue And The Muse Who Directs His Pen. In Harmony With "The Sweet New Style" Of Sincerity With Which Dante Treats Of Love, Thomas Bernart De Ventadorn Sings: "It is no wonder if I sing better than any other singer, for my heart draws near to Love and I am a better man for Love's command." Not in literature alone but in actual life did chivalry exalt "the eternal womanly." In Dante's age, to quote the author of Phases of Thought and Criticism, "Knights passed from land to land in search of adventure, vowed to protect and defend the widow and the orphan and the lonely woman at the hazard of their lives: they went about with a prayer on their lips and in their hearts the image of the lady-love whom they had chosen to serve and to whom they had pledged loyalty and fidelity: they strove to be chaste in body and soul and as a tower of strength for the protection of this spirit of chastity, they were taught to venerate the Virgin Mother Mary and cultivate toward her a tender devotion as the purest and holiest ideal of womanhood. This spirit of chivalry is the ruling spirit of Dante's life and the inspiration of some of his sublimest flights."