with art, for the great sculptors and painters had not then arisen. The
age was still dark; the mariner's compass had not been invented,
chimneys had not been introduced, the comforts of life were few. Dames
of highest rank still spent their days over the distaff or in combing
flax. There were no grand structures but cathedral churches. Life was
laborious, dismal, and turbulent. Law and order did not reign in cities
or villages. The poor were oppressed by nobles. Commerce was small and
manufactures scarce. Men lived in dreary houses, without luxuries, on
coarse bread and fruit and vegetables. The crusades had not come to an
end. It was the age of bad popes and quarrelsome nobles, and lazy monks
and haughty bishops, and ignorant people, steeped in gloomy
superstitions, two hundred years before America was discovered, and two
hundred and fifty years before Michael Angelo erected the dome of
St. Peter's.

But there was faith in the world, and rough virtues, sincerity, and
earnestness of character, though life was dismal. Men believed in
immortality and in expiation for sin. The rising universities had gifted
scholars whose abstruse speculations have never been rivalled for
acuteness and severity of logic. There were bards and minstrels, and
chivalric knights and tournaments and tilts, and village _fêtes_ and
hospitable convents and gentle ladies,--gentle and lovely even in all
states of civilization, winning by their graces and inspiring men to
deeds of heroism and gallantry.

In one of those domestic revolutions which were so common in Italy Dante
was banished, and his property was confiscated; and he at the age of
thirty-five, about the year 1300, when Giotto was painting portraits,
was sent forth a wanderer and an exile, now poor and unimportant, to eat
the bread of strangers and climb other people's stairs; and so obnoxious