he preserved all the same an ever grateful memory of the “magnifico e vittorioso signore di Verona,” to whom he dedicated the third of his Canticles”[30] (i.e. the Paradiso).
The character of Cangrande is an extremely attractive one. His valour, his consideration for his foes, his hospitality to all who needed it, his patronage of art and learning, make him not only an admirable but a loveable figure. Nor should his labours for the good of his people and for his native town be forgotten. He revised the Statutes that Mastino I. had caused to be compiled for the government of Verona, and added another book to the five which already existed. His love of building—a love shared by well-nigh every member of his house—took shape in a fresh circuit of walls, which he caused to be erected round the city in 1324, when wars and wranglings throughout the greater part of Lombardy made the outlook threatening for Verona, and persuaded Cangrande of the advisability of protecting his city from any possible invasion. His early death must ever be deplored; and there can be no doubt that had it not been for that catastrophe many of his schemes for the greatness of Italy would have been effected, and the state of the country for one or two successive centuries materially altered. The chief stain on his memory is the share he had in the murder of Passerino Bonaccolsi, lord of Mantua (1327), from which not even his warmest panegyrists can entirely exonerate him. It can only be pleaded that considering the times in which he lived, and the habits and customs of his contemporaries, he was remarkably
free from the crime—only too common in those days—of murdering every suspected foe, and that with this one exception his hands were never dyed with the blood of his neighbours.
Ruskin sums up Cangrande’s doings in the following words: “He fortified Verona against the Germans; dug the great moat out of its rocks; built its wall and towers; established his court of royal and thoughtful hospitality; became the chief Ghibelline Captain in Lombardy, and the receiver of noble exiles from all other states; possessed himself by hard fighting of Vicenza also, then of Padua; then, either by strength or subtlety, of Feltre, Belluno, Bassano; and died at thirty-seven—of eating apples when he was too hot—in the year 1329.”[31]