privilege thus to commemorate so many famous men her sons, whose claim to
pre-eminence the whole world would concede. Among them is one figure
before which every scholar, every man who has been touched by the tragedy
of life, lingers with reverential pity. The haggard cheeks, the lips
clamped together in unfaltering resolve, the scars of lifelong battle,
and the brow whose sharp outline seems the monument of final victory,--
this, at least, is a face that needs no name beneath it. This is he who
among literary fames finds only two that for growth and immutability can
parallel his own. The suffrages of highest authority would now place him
second in that company where he with proud humility took the sixth
place.[4]

Dante (Durante, by contraction Dante) degli Alighieri was born at
Florence in 1265, probably during the month of May.[5] This is the date
given by Boccaccio, who is generally followed, though he makes a blunder
in saying, _sedendo Urbano quarto nella cattedra di San Pietro_, for
Urban died in October, 1264. Some, misled by an error in a few of the
early manuscript copies of the _Divina Commedia_, would have him born
five years earlier, in 1260. According to Arrivabene,[6] Sansovino was
the first to confirm Boccaccio's statement by the authority of the poet
himself, basing his argument on the first verse of the _Inferno_,--

"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita";

the average age of man having been declared by the Psalmist to be seventy
years, and the period of the poet's supposed vision being unequivocally
fixed at 1300.[7] Leonardo Aretino and Manetti add their testimony to
that of Boccaccio, and 1265 is now universally assumed as the true date.
Voltaire,[8] nevertheless, places the poet's birth in 1260, and jauntily
forgives Bayle (who, he says, _ecrivait a Rotterdam_ currente calamo