was indeed a great traveler. During his twenty years' exile, we know
that our poet's itinerary led him among other places to Padua, Venice,
Ravenna, Paris and there is good reason to believe, as Gladstone
contends, that he went for study to Oxford. The regret is permissible
that he did not leave us an account of his journeyings. "Had he given us
pictures--as he alone could have painted them--of scenes by the wayside
and of the courts of which he was an honored guest," says Dr. J.A. Zahm
in his Great Inspirers, "we should have had the most interesting
and the most instructive travel book ever written."

We cannot but notice one great effect brought about by traveling in
those days, especially by pilgrimages and by the Crusades formed in
defence of pilgrimages to the Holy Land and that is, that there arose on
all sides a desire for liberty and the growth of a spirit of nationality
that worked to the destruction of absolute government. The power of the
common people began to assert itself. In 1215, England forced from John
Lackland the Magna Charta, the foundation of all the liberty of English
speaking people even in modern times. The very year in which Dante was
born, representatives of the townspeople were admitted as members of the
English Parliament. In France, during the thirteenth century, the
centralization of power in the hands of the kings went forward with the
gradual diminution of the influence of the nobility--a fact operating to
the people's advantage.

In 1222 the nobles forced Andrew II of Hungary to issue the Golden Bull,
the instrument which Blackstone later declared turned "anarchy into
law." In Germany and Sicily Frederick II published laws giving a larger
measure of popular freedom. In Italy, the existence of the city
republics--especially those of Florence, Sienna, Pisa--showed how
successfully the ferment of liberty had penetrated the mass of the