[125] In 1350 a sum of ten gold florins was sent from Florence by the hands of Boccaccio to Beatrice, daughter of Dante; she being then a nun at Ravenna.
[126] The embassy to Venice is mentioned by Villani, and there was a treaty concluded in 1321 between the Republic and Guido. But Dante’s name does not appear in it among those of the envoys from Ravenna. A letter, probably apocryphal, to Guido from Dante in Venice is dated 1314. If Dante, as is maintained by some writers, was engaged in tuition while in Ravenna, it is to be feared that his pupils would find in him an impatient master.
[127] Not that Dante ever mentions these any more than a hundred other churches in which he must have spent thoughtful hours.
[128] Purg. xxviii. 20.
[129] A certain Cecco d’Ascoli stuck to him like a bur, charging him, among other things, with lust, and a want of religious faith which would one day secure him a place in his own Inferno. Cecco was himself burned in Florence, in 1327, for making too much of evil spirits, and holding that human actions are necessarily affected by the position of the stars. He had been at one time a professor of astronomy.
[130] Gabriel Rossetti, Comment on the Divina Commedia, 1826, and Aroux, Dante, Hérétique, Révolutionnaire et Socialiste, 1854.
[131] Scartazzini, Dante Alighieri, Seine Zeit, etc., 1879, page 268.
[132] Parad. xxiv. 86.
[133] Parad. xxiv. 145.
[134] Inf. xxvii. 101; Purg. iii. 118.