intention of the other writings.




CHAPTER III.


Much fault is in that thing which is appointed to remove some grave
evil, and yet encourages it; even as in the man who might be sent to
quell a tumult, and, before he had quelled it, should begin another.

And forasmuch as my bread is made clean on one side, it behoves me to
cleanse it on the other, in order to shun this reproof: that my
writing, which one may term, as it were, a Commentary, is appointed to
remove obscurity from the before-mentioned Songs, and is, in fact,
itself at times a little hard to understand. This obscurity is here
intended, in order to avoid a greater defect, and does not occur
through ignorance. Alas! would that it might have pleased the
Dispenser of the Universe that the cause of my excuse might never have
been; that others might neither have sinned against me, nor I have
suffered punishment unjustly; the punishment, I say, of exile and
poverty! Since it was the pleasure of the citizens of the most
beautiful and the most famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast me
out from her most sweet bosom (wherein I was born and nourished even
to the height of my life, and in which, with her goodwill, I desire
with all my heart to repose my weary soul, and to end the time which
is given to me), I have gone through almost all the land in which this
language lives--a pilgrim, almost a mendicant--showing forth against
my will the wound of Fortune, with which the ruined man is often