Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: letter to the Italian Cardinals mentioned by Villani, were all published, together with others more or less doubtful, until the first complete edition of the Epistles of Dante, printed in 1842, exclusive of the two Eclogues, contained fourteen. But, of these fourteen, four may be absolutely dismissed at once. Three letters, supposed to be written from the Countess of Battifolle to the Empress Margaretha, have nothing to do with Dante; a fourth, a preposterous account, in Italian, of an altogether impossible embassy to the Venetians on behalf of Guido da Polenta, the lord of Ravenna, is a clumsy forgery. Two others may also be excluded from discussion here—the letters to the Cardinal Nicholas of Prato, and to the nephews of Alessandro da Romena; the latter may possibly be a genuine letter from one of the Florentine exiles, which some scribe or copyist has erroneously ascribed to Dante (though it strikes me personally as a forgery, differing only in degree of clumsiness from the letter to Guido da Polenta) ; the former, if genuine, is a valuable historical document, but there is no adequate reason for connecting it with Dante.1 There is, indeed, one great letter which has yet to be rediscovered,—if it anywhere still exists. Villani tells us that Dante sent a letter to the rulers of Florence, complaining of his unjust exile; and it seems almost certain, from Leonardo Bruni's narrative, that this was not that violent letter which we now have (Epist. vi. in the Oxford Dante), but another, written after Dante had broken with his fellow-exiles and had sought his primo rifugio e primoostello in the courtesy of the " great Lombard." Let us hear Leonardo himself :— 1 For recent views as to the authenticity of the letters, see Mr. Wicksteed's Appendix to Witte's Essays on Dante (London...