Page:The Earliest Lives of Dante (Smith 1901).djvu/69



The first part of the poem, a wonderful invention, Dante entitled the Inferno. He wrote it not in the manner of a pagan, but as a most Christian poet; a thing which had never before been done under this title. And now when he was most intent on his glorious work and had completed the first seven cantos, occurred the grievous misfortune of his banishment, or flight, as it is proper to call it. As a result, he abandoned this work of his and all else, and wandered uncertain of himself for many years among divers friends and lords.

But even as we certainly must believe that Fortune can work nothing contrary to what God ordains, whereby she can divert the force of its destined end, though she can perhaps delay it, so it happened that some one found the seven cantos that Dante had composed. He made the discovery while searching for some needed document among the chests of Dante's things, which had been hastily removed into sacred places at the time when the ungrateful and lawless multitude, more eager for booty than for just revenge, tumultuously rushed to his house.

This person read the cantos with admiration, though he did not know what they were; and, impelled by his exceeding delight in them, he carefully withdrew them from the place where they lay, and brought them to one of our citizens, by name Dino di Messer Lambertuccio, a famous poet of that time, and a man of high intelligence.