poor victim of events--the infant changed at nurse by the wicked. What
came out of him, he must have had in him, at least in the germ; and so
inconsistent was his nature altogether, or, at any rate, such an epitome
of all the graver passions that are capable of co-existing, both sweet
and bitter, thoughtful and outrageous, that one is sometimes tempted to
think he must have had an angel for one parent, and--I shall leave his
own toleration to say what--for the other.

To continue the account of his manners and inclinations: He dressed with
a becoming gravity; was temperate in his diet; a great student; seldom
spoke, unless spoken to, but always to the purpose; and almost all the
anecdotes recorded of him, except by himself, are full of pride and
sarcasm. He was so swarthy, that a woman, as he was going by a door in
Verona, is said to have pointed him out to another, with a remark
which made the saturnine poet smile--"That is the man who goes to hell
whenever he pleases, and brings back news of the people there." On which
her companion observed--"Very likely; don't you see what a curly beard he
has, and what a dark face? owing, I dare say, to the heat and smoke." He
was evidently a passionate lover of painting and music--is thought to
have been less strict in his conduct with regard to the sex than might
be supposed from his platonical aspirations--(Boccaccio says, that even
a goitre did not repel him from the pretty face of a mountaineer)--could
be very social when he was young, as may be gathered from the sonnet
addressed to his friend Cavalcante about a party for a boat--and though
his poetry was so intense and weighty, the laudable minuteness of a
biographer has informed us, that his hand-writing, besides being neat
and precise, was of a long and particularly thin character: "meagre" is
his word.

There is a letter, said to be nearly coeval with his time, and to be