Page:Maurice Hewlett--Little novels of Italy.djvu/246

234 be at mass to-morrow—that would do. Meantime the cook produced a most triumphal cake hot and hot, and the transports of poor Messer Cino were forgotten.

Dante's reply to his copy was so characteristic that I must anticipate a little to speak of it. He confined himself almost entirely to technicalities, strongly objecting to the sestett with its three rhymes in the middle, upon which Cino had prided himself in no small degree. The only thing he seemed to care for was the tenth line, "A dolce morte sotto dolce inganno," which you may render, if you like, "To a sweet death under so sweet deceit"; but he said there were too many "o's" in it. "As to the subject of your poem," he wrote in a postscript, "love is a thing of so terrible a nature that not lightly is it to be entered, since it cannot be lightly left; and, seeing the latter affair is much out of a man's power, he should be wary with the former, wherein at present he would appear to have some discretion, though not very much." This was chilly comfort; but by the time it reached him Cino was beyond the assault of chills.

Equally interesting should it be to record the conversation of Monna Selvaggia with her discreet friend Nicoletta; yet I cannot record everything. Nicoletta had a lover of her own, a most proper poet, who had got far beyond the mere accidence of the science where Cino was fumbling now; you might say that he was at theory. Nicoletta, moreover, was sixteen years old, a marriageable age, an age indeed at which not to have a lover would have been a disgrace. She had had son-