"Con l'altre donne mia vista gabbate,
E non pensate, donna, onde si mova
Ch'io vi rassembri sì figura nova,
Quando riguardo la vostra beltate," &c. Son. 5.

"You laugh with the other ladies to see how I look (literally, you mock
my appearance); and do not think, lady, what it is that renders me so
strange a figure at sight of your beauty."

And in the sonnet that follows, he accuses her of preventing pity of him
in others, by such "killing mockery" as makes him wish for death ("_la
pietà, che 'l vostro gabbo recinde_," &c.)[7]

Now, it is to be admitted, that a young lady, if she is not very wise,
may laugh at her lover with her companions, and yet return his love,
after her fashion; but the fair Portinari laughs and marries another.
Some less melancholy face, some more intelligible courtship, triumphed
over the questionable flattery of the poet's gratuitous worship; and the
idol of Dante Alighieri became the wife of Messer Simone de' Bardi. Not
a word does he say on that mortifying point. It transpired from a clause
in her father's will. And yet so bent are the poet's biographers on
leaving a romantic doubt in one's mind, whether Beatrice may not have
returned his passion, that not only do all of them (as far as I have
observed) agree in taking no notice of these sonnets, but the author
of the treatise entitled _Dante and the Catholic Philosophy of the
Thirteenth Century_, "in spite" (as a critic says) "of the _Beatrice,
his daughter, wife of Messer Simone de' Bardi_, of the paternal will,"
describes her as dying in "all the lustre of virginity." [8] The
assumption appears to be thus gloriously stated, as a counterpart to the
notoriety of its untruth. It must be acknowledged, that Dante himself