Could not their quarries furnish forth one bust?
Did they not to her breast their filial earth entrust?[10]
Dante was born at Florence in the year 1261. He fought in two battles, and was fourteen times ambassador, and once prior of the republic. Through one fatal error, he fell a victim to party persecution, which ended in irrevocable banishment. His last resting-place was Ravenna, where the persecution of his only patron is said to have caused the poet's death. What an affecting record of gratitude! His last days at Ravenna are thus referred to by an accomplished tourist:[11]
"Under the kind protection of Guido Novello da Polenta, here Dante found an asylum from the malevolence of his enemies, and here he ended a life embittered with many sorrows, as he has pathetically told to posterity, 'after having gone about like a mendicant; wandering over almost every part to which our language extends; showing against my will the wound with which fortune has smitten me, and which is so often imputed to his ill-deserving, on whom it is inflicted.' The precise time of his death is not accurately ascertained; but, it was either in July or September of the year 1321. His friend in adversity, Guido da Polenta, mourned his loss, and testified his sorrow and respect by a sumptuous funeral, and, it is said, intended to have erected a monument to his memory; but, the following year, contending factions deprived him of the sovereignty which he had held for more than half a century; and he, in his turn, like the great poet whom he had protected, died in exile. I believe, however, that the tomb, with an inscription purporting to have been written by Dante himself, of which I have here given an outline, was erected at the time of his decease: and, that his portrait, in bas-relief, was afterwards added by Bernardo Bembo, in the year 1483, who, at that time was a Senator and Podestà of the Venetian republic."
Byron truly sings:
Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar,
Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore;
Thy factions, in their worse than civil war,
Proscribed the bard whose name for evermore