—Mary Wollstonecraft

Others may trace the love-tales of milkmaids and farmhands; I deal with the people who have made their mark upon the times; people who have tinted the world's thought-fabric and to whose genius we are all heirs. And the reason the story of their love is vital to us is because their love was vital to them. Thought is born of parents, and literature is the child of married minds. So this, then, is the love-story of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

History and literature are very closely related. If one sets down the chief events in political history, and over against these writes the names of the radical authors and orators of the time, he can not but be convinced that literature leads, and soldiers and politicians are puppets tossed on the tide of time. A thought, well expressed, is a bomb that explodes indefinitely.

Two men, Rousseau and Voltaire, lighted the fuse that created the explosion known as the French Revolution. Luther's books and sermons brought about the Reformation.

Thomas Paine's little book, "The Crisis," of which half a million copies were printed and distributed from Virginia to Maine, stirred the Colonists to the sticking-point; and George Washington, who was neither a writer nor an orator, paid "Letters and Truth" the tribute of saying, "Without the pamphlets of Thomas Paine the hearts and minds of the people would never have been prepared to respond to our call for troops." No one disputes now that it was a book written by a woman, of which a million copies were sold in the North, that prepared the way for Lincoln's call for volunteers.

Literature and oratory are arsenals that supply the people their armament of reasons. And through the use and exercise of these borrowed reasons, we learn to create new ones for ourselves. Thinkers prepare the way for thinkers, and every John the Baptist uttering his cry in the wilderness is heard.

And the fate of John the Baptist, and the fate of the Man whom he preceded, are typical of the fate of all who are bold enough to carry the standard of revolt into the camp of the entrenched enemy. The Cross is a mighty privilege; and only the sublimely great are able to pay the price at which hemlock is held.

Buddha said that the finest word in any language is "Equanimity." This is a paradox, and like every paradox implies that the reverse is equally true. Equanimity in the face of opposition, steadfastness in time of stress, and wise and useful purpose, are truly godlike.

And there is only one thing worth fighting for, talking for, or writing for; and all literature and all oratory have this for their central theme—Freedom. It was only Freedom that could lure Cincinnatus from his plow or Lincoln from his law-office.

And so Mary Wollstonecraft's book, "The Rights of Woman," was the first strong, earnest, ringing word on the subject. She summed up the theme once and for all, just as an essay by Herbert Spencer anticipates and answers every objection, exhausting the theme. And that the author had a whimsical touch of humor in her composition is shown in that she dedicates the book to that Prince of Woman-Haters, "Talleyrand, Late Bishop of Autun."

"Political Justice," by William Godwin, was published in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-three. The work, on its first appearance, created a profound impression among English thinking people, although orthodoxy has almost succeeded in smothering it in silence since John Stuart Mill declared that this book created an epoch and deserved to rank with Milton's "Speech for Unlicensed Printing," Locke's "Essay on Human Understanding" or Jean Jacques' "Emile." That it was a positive force in Mill's own life he always admitted.

However, it is only within our own time—only, in fact, since Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six—that the views of Godwin as expressed in "Political Justice" have been adopted by the spirit of Christendom. Godwin believed in the perfectibility of the race, and proved that man's career has been a constant movement forward. That is, there never was a "Fall of Man." Man has always fallen upward, and when he has kicked the ball it has always been toward the goal. Godwin believed that it was well to scan the faults of our fellows closely, in order to see, forsooth, whether they are not their virtues. The belief that mankind should by nature tend to evil, he considered absurd and unscientific, for the strongest instinct in all creation is self-preservation; and that certain men should love darkness rather than light was mainly because governments and religions have warped man's nature through oppression and coercion until it no longer acts normally. "Normal man seeks the light, just as the flowers do. Man, if not too much interfered with, will make for himself the best possible environment and create for his children right conditions because the instinct for peace and liberty is deeply rooted in his nature. Control by another has led to revolt, and revolt has led to oppression, and oppression occasions grief and deadness: hence bruises and distortion follow. When we view humanity, we behold not the true and natural man, but a deformed and pitiable product, undone by the vices of those who have sought to improve on Nature by shaping his life to feed the vanity of a few and minister to their wantonness. In our plans for social betterment, let us hold in mind the healthy and unfettered man, and not the cripple that interference and restraint have made."

Godwin, like Robert Ingersoll, was the son of a clergyman, which reminds me that liberal thought is under great obligations to the clergy, since their sons, taught by antithesis, are often shining lights of radicalism. Godwin was a non-resistant, philosophic anarchist. He was the true predecessor of George Eliot, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy, and the best that is now being expressed from advanced Christian pulpits harks back to him. All that the foremost of our contemporary thinkers have written and said was suggested and touched upon by William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, with like conclusions.

Carnegie is credited with this: "There is only one generation between shirt-sleeves and shirt-sleeves." Now, the grandfather of Mary Wollstonecraft was an employing-weaver who did his work so well that his wares commanded a price.

He grew rich, and when he died he left a fortune of some thirty thousand pounds, not being able to take it with him. This fortune descended to his eldest son.

Samuel Johnson thought the law of primogeniture a most excellent thing, since it insured there being only one fool in the family. The Wollstonecraft boys who had no money went to work, and in taking care of themselves became strong, sturdy and prosperous men. The one who succeeded to the patrimony was at first a gentleman, then a shabby-genteel, and at forty his time was taken up with schemes to dodge the debtors' prison, and with plans to pay off the National Debt; for it seems that men who can not manage their own affairs are not deterred thereby from volunteering to look after those of the nation.

It appears, also, that Mr. Wollstonecraft wrote a book entitled, "How to Command Success," and by its sale hoped to retrieve the fortune now lost—but alas! he ran in debt to the printer and finally sold the copyright to that worthy for five shillings, and on the proceeds got plain drunk.

The family moved as often as landlords demanded, which was about every three months. There were three girls in the family—Mary, Everina and Eliza—all above the average in intelligence. Whether there is any such thing in Nature as justice for the individual is a question, but cosmic justice is beyond cavil. The stupidity of a parent is often a very precious factor in the evolution of his children. He teaches them by antithesis. So if a man can not be useful and strong, all is not lost: he can still serve humanity as a horrible example—like the honest hobo who volunteered to pay the farmer for his dinner by acting as a scarecrow. Children of drunkards make temperance fanatics; and those who have a shiftless father stand a better chance of developing into financiers than if they had a parent who would set them up in business, stand between them and danger, and meet the deficit.

Women married to punk husbands need not be discouraged, nor should husbands with nagging wives be cast down, for was it not Emerson who said, "It is better to be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo?"

Thus do all things work together for good, whether you love the Lord or not.

The Wollstonecraft family traversed London with their handcart, from Chelsea to East End; they also roamed through Essex, Yorkshire and Kent. When matters became strained they fell back on London, paid one month's rent in advance and then stayed three, when their goods and chattels were gently landed on the curb, and the handcart came in handy.

As the girls grew up they worked at weaving, served as house-girls and nurses, and finally Mary became a governess in the family of Lord Kingsborough, an Irish nobleman. This gave her access to her employer's library, and she went at it as a hungry colt enters a clover-field. Not knowing how long her good fortune would last, she eagerly improved her time. She wrote frequent letters to her sisters, telling what she was doing and what she was reading. She was eminently superior to any of the females in the family, and acknowledged it. A tutor in the house taught her French; and whether the nobleman's children learned much or not, we do not know, but Mary soon equaled her teacher.

Knowledge is a matter of desire.

The next year the Wollstonecraft girls opened a private school, a kind of "Young Ladies' Establishment," quite on the Mrs. Nickleby order. And indeed, if a Micawber had been wanting, Mary knew where to look for him.

About this time Mary met Ursa Major, who may have treated men very rudely, but not your petite, animated and clever women.

Doctor Johnson quite liked little Mary Wollstonecraft. She matched her wit against his and put him on his mettle, and when Mary once expressed a desire to become an authoress he encouraged her by saying, "Yes, my dear, you should write, for that is the way to learn; and no matter how badly you write, you can always be encouraged by finding men who write worse." And another time he said, "Women have quite as much interest in life as men, and see things just as clearly, and why they should not write the last word as well as speak it, I do not know."

That settled it with Mary: She gave up her part in the school; and very soon after, the sisters gave up theirs; one of them wedding a ne'er-do-well scion of nobility, and the other marrying an orthodox curate with a harelip. Through the help of Doctor Johnson, Mary got a position as proofreader with a publisher. Here her knowledge of French was valuable, and she assisted in translations. Then she became literary adviser and reader for different publishers. She was making money, and had accumulated a little fortune of near a hundred pounds by the sweat of her brain. Her close acquaintanceship with printers and publishers thus placed her where she became acquainted with several statesmen who had speeches to make, and for these she constructed arguments and also helped them out of dire difficulties by rounding out their periods, and by introducing flights of fancy for men whose fancies were wingless.

On her own account she had written various stories and essays. She had met the wits and thinkers of London and had learned to take care of herself. She was an honest, industrious, and highly intelligent woman, and commanded the respect of those who knew her best. "To know her," says Godwin in his Memoirs, "was to love her, and those who did not love her, did not know her."

Of course, she was an exceptional person, for have I not intimated that she was a thinker? This was over a hundred years ago, and thinkers were as scarce then as now, for even so-called educated folk, for the most part, only think that they think. Frederic Harrison did not stray far a-field when he referred to Charlotte Perkins Gilman as a reincarnation of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary Wollstonecraft had translated Rousseau's "Emile" into English, and had read Voltaire closely and with appreciation.

The momentous times of Seventeen Hundred Ninety-two were on in Paris. That mob of women, ragged and draggled, had tramped out to Versailles, and Marie Antoinette, a foolish girl who rattled around in a place that should have been occupied by a Queen, had looked out of the window and propounded her immortal question, "What do they want?"

"Bread!" was the answer.

"Why don't they eat cake?" asked Her Chatterbox.

Mary Wollstonecraft was a revolutionary by nature. Looking about her she saw London seething with swarms of humanity just one day's rations removed from starvation. A few miles away she saw acres upon acres—thousands of acres—kept and guarded for private parks and game-preserves. Then it was that she supplied Henry George that fine phrase, "Man is a land animal." And she fully comprehended that the question of human rights will never be ended until we settle the land question. She said: "Man is a land animal, and to deprive the many of the right to till the soil is like depriving fishes of the right to swim in the sea. You force fish into a net, and they cease to thrive; you entrap men, through economic necessity, in cities, and allow a few to control the land, and you perpetuate ignorance and crime. And eventually you breed a race of beings who take no joy in Nature, never having gotten acquainted with her. The problem is not one of religion, but of commonsense in economics. Back to the land!" Of course a writing woman who could think like this was deeply interested in the unrest across the Channel.

And so Mary packed up and went over to Paris, lured by three things: a curiosity concerning the great social experiment being there worked out; an ambition to perfect herself in the French language by speaking only French; a writer's natural thirst for good copy.

In all these things the sojourn of Mary Wollstonecraft in Paris was an eminent success, but tragedy was lurking and lying in wait for her. And it came to her as it has come for women ever since time began—through that awful handicap, her nature's crying need for affection.

In Paris martial law reigned supreme; in the streets the death-tumbrel rattled, and through a crack in the closed casement Mary Wollstonecraft peered cautiously out and saw Louis the Sixteenth riding calmly to his death. The fact that she was an Englishwoman brought Mary Wollstonecraft under suspicion, for the English sympathized with royalty. When men with bloody hands come to your door, and question you concerning your business and motives, the mind is not ripe for literature!

The letters Mary Wollstonecraft had written for English journals she now destroyed, since she could not mail them, and to keep them was to run the risk of having them misinterpreted. The air was full of fear and fever.

No one was allowed to leave the city unless positively necessary, and to ask permission to go was to place one's self under surveillance.

It was at this time that Mary Wollstonecraft met Gilbert Imlay, an American, who had fought with Lafayette and Washington. He was a man of some means, alert, active and of good address. On account of his relationship with Lafayette, he stood well with the revolutionaries of Paris. He was stopping at the same hotel where Mary lodged, and very naturally, speaking the same language, they became acquainted. She allowed herself to be placed under his protection, and their simple friendship soon ripened into a warmer feeling. Love is largely a matter of propinquity.

It was a time when all formal rites were in abeyance; and in England any marriage-contract made in France, and not sanctified by the clergy, was not regarded as legal. Mary Wollstonecraft became Mrs. Mary Imlay, and that she regarded herself as much the wife of Imlay as God and right could command, there is no doubt.

In a few months the tempest and tumult subsided so they got away from Paris to Havre, where Imlay was interested in a shipping-office. At Havre their daughter Fanny was born.

Imlay had made investments in timber-lands in Norway, and was shipping lumber to France. Some of these ventures turned out well, and Imlay extended his investments on borrowed capital. The man was a nomad by nature—generous, extravagant and kind—but he lacked the patience and application required to succeed as a businessman. He could not wait—he wanted quick returns.

The wife had insight and intellect, and could follow a reason to its lair. Imlay skimmed the surface.

Leaving his wife and babe at Havre, he went across to London. Mary once made a trip to Norway for him, with the power of attorney, to act as she thought best in his interests. In Norway she found that much of the land that Imlay had bought was worthless, being already stripped of its timber. However, she improved the time by writing letters for London papers, and these eventually found form in her book entitled, "Letters From Norway."

Arriving at Havre she found that Imlay had dismantled their home, and for a time she did not know his whereabouts. Later they met in London.

When the time of separation came, however, she was sufficiently disillusioned to make the actual parting without pain. When Imlay saw she would no longer consent to be his wife, he proposed to provide for her, but she declined the offer, fearing it would give him some claim upon her and upon their child. And so Gilbert Imlay sailed away to America and out of the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Exit Imlay.>

In London the position of Mary Wollstonecraft was most trying.

Penniless, deserted by Imlay, her husband, with a hungry babe at her breast, she was looked at askance by most of her old acquaintances. There were not wanting good folks who gathered their skirts about them, sneezed as she passed, and said, "I told you so."

Her brother Charles—a degenerate, pettifogging barrister, with all his father's faults and none of his grandfather's virtues—for whom Mary had advanced money so that he could go to college, came to her in her dire extremity and proffered help. But it was on condition that she should give up her babe and allow him to place it in a foundlings' home. This being done, the virtuous Charles would get Mary a position as weaver in a woolen-mill, under an assumed name, and the past would be as if it never had been. This in the face of the assertion of Pliny, who said, eighteen hundred years before, that one of the things even God could not do, was to obliterate the past; and of Omar's words, "Nor all your tears shall blot a line of it."

The mental processes of Charles are shown in his suggestion of a pleasant plan whereby Imlay could be lured back to England, arrested, and with the assistance of a bumbailiff, marriage forced upon him. His scheme was rejected by the obdurate Mary, who held that the very essence of marriage was freedom.

The tragic humor of the action of Charles turns on his assumption that his sister was "a fallen woman," and must be saved from disgrace. This opinion was shared by various other shady respectables, who kept the matter secret by lifting a soprano wail of woe from the housetops, declaring that Mary had smirched their good names and those of their friends by her outrageous conduct. These people also busied themselves in spreading a report that Mary had gone into "French ways," it being strongly held, then as now, by the rank and file of burly English beef-eaters, male and female, that morality in France is an iridescent dream—only that is not the exact expression they use.

Hope sank in the heart of the lone woman, and for a few weeks it appeared that suicide was the only way out. As for parting with her child, or with her brother Charles and his kin, Mary would stand by her child. It is related that on one occasion her sister Everina came to visit her, and Mary made bold to minister to her babe in the beautiful maternal way sanctified by time, before bottle-babies became the vogue and Nature was voted vulgar. The sight proved too much for Everina's nerves, and she fainted, first loudly calling for the camphor.

The family din evidently caused Mary to go a step further than she otherwise might, and she dropped the name Imlay and called herself plain Mary Wollstonecraft, thus glorifying the disgrace. This increased fortitude had come about by discovering that she could still work and earn enough money to live on by proofreading and translations; and it seemed that she had a head full of ideas. There in her lonely lodgings at Blackfriars, in the third story back, she was writing "The Rights of Woman." The book in places shows heat and haste, and its fault is not that it leads people in the wrong direction, but that it leads them too far in the right direction—that is, further than a sin-stained and hypocritical world can follow.

When men deserve the ideal, it will be here. If mankind were honest and unselfish, then every proposition held out by Mary Wollstonecraft would hold true. Her book is a vindication, in one sense, of her own position—for at the last, all literature is a confession. But Mary Wollstonecraft's book is also a plea for faith in the Divinity that shapes humanity and "leads us on amid the encircling gloom."

It is moreover a protest against the theological idea that woman is the instrument of the Devil, who tempted man to his ruin. Very frank is the entire expression, all written by a Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a pure woman whom Fate had freed from the conventional, and who, wanting little and having nothing to lose, not even a reputation, was placed in a position where she could speak the truth.

Parts of the book seem trite enough to us at this day, since many of the things advocated have come about, and we accept them as if they always were. For instance, there is an argument in favor of women being employed as schoolteachers; then there is the plea for public schools and for co-education.

William and Mary first met in February, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six. In this matter dates are authentic, for Godwin kept a diary for forty-eight years, in which he set down his acts, gave the titles of books he read, and named the distinguished people he met. This diary is nearly as valuable as that of Samuel Pepys, save that unfortunately it does not record the inconsequential and amplify the irrelevant, for it is the seemingly trivial that pictures character. Godwin's diary forms a continuous history of literary and artistic London.

William was not favorably impressed with Mary, the first time they met each other. Tom Paine was present, and Godwin wanted to hear him talk about America, and instead Mary insisted upon talking about Paris, and Tom preferred to listen to her rather than to talk himself.

"The drawing-room was not big enough for this precious pair," says Godwin, and passes on to minor themes, not realizing that destiny was waiting for him around the corner.

The next time they met, William liked Mary better, for he did most of the talking, and she listened. When we are pleased with ourselves we are pleased with others. "She has wondrous eyes, and they welled with tears as we conversed. She surely has suffered, for her soul is all alive," wrote Godwin.

The third time they met, she asked permission to quote from his book, "Political Justice," in her own book, "The Rights of Woman," upon which she was hard at work. They were getting quite well acquainted, and he was so impressed with her personality that he ceased to mention her in his diary.

Godwin's book had placed him upon the topmost turret of contemporary literary fame. Since the publication of the work he was fairly prosperous, although his temperament was of that gently procrastinating and gracious kind that buys peace with a faith in men and things. Mary had an eager, alert and enthusiastic way of approaching things that grew on the easy-going Godwin. Her animation was contagious.

The bold stand Mary had taken on the subject of marriage; her frankness and absolute honesty; her perfect willingness at all times to abide by the consequences of her mistakes, all pleased Godwin beyond words.

He told Coleridge that she was the greatest woman in England, and Coleridge looked her over with a philosopher's eye, and reported her favorably to Southey. In a letter to Cottle, Robert Southey says: "Of all the lions or literati I have seen here, Mary Imlay's countenance is the best, infinitely the best; the only fault in it is an expression somewhat similar to what the prints of Horne Tooke display—an expression indicating superiority; not haughtiness, not sarcasm, in Mary Imlay, but still it is unpleasant. Her eyes are light brown, and although the lid of one of them is affected by a little paralysis, they are the most meaning I ever saw. As for Godwin himself, he has large, noble eyes, and a nose—oh, a most abominable nose! Language is not vituperatious enough to describe the effect of its downward elongation." In mentioning the matter of Godwin's nose, it is perhaps well to remember that Southey merely gave a pretty good description of his own.

In August, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, Godwin borrowed fifty pounds from Thomas Wedgwood, son of Josiah Wedgwood of Etruria, which money was to tide Mary over a financial stress, and afford her the necessary leisure to complete "The Rights of Woman." The experience that Mary Wollstonecraft had in the publishing business, now enabled her to make favorable arrangements for the issue of her book. The radicalism of America and France had leavened England until there was quite a market for progressive literature. Twenty years later, the work would have been ignored in silence or censored out of existence, so zigzag is the path of progress.

As it was, the work sold so that in six months from the time it was put on sale, Mary had received upwards of two hundred pounds in royalties. Recognition and success are hygienic. Mrs. Blood, an erstwhile friend, saw Mary about this time, and wrote to an acquaintance: "I declare if she isn't getting handsome and knows it. She has well turned thirty and has a sprinkling of gray hair and a few wrinkles, but she is doing her best to retrieve her youth."

Mary had now quit Blackfriars for better quarters near Hyde Park. Her health was fully restored, and she moved in her own old circle of writers and thinkers.

At this time William and Mary were both well out of the kindergarten. He was forty and she was thirty-seven. Several years before, William had issued a sort of proclamation to the public, and a warning to women of the quest that bachelordom was his by choice, and that he was wedded to philosophy. Very young people are given to this habit of declaration, "I intend never to wed," and it seems that older heads are just as absurd as young ones. It is well to refrain from mentioning what we intend to do, or intend not to do, since we are all sailing under sealed orders and nothing is so apt to occur as the unexpected.

Towards the last of the year Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, William was introducing Mary as his wife, and congratulations were in order. To them, mutual love constituted marriage, and when love died, marriage was at an end.

A sharp rebuke was printed about this time by Mary, evidently prompted by that pestiferous class of law-breakers who do not recognize that the opposites of things are alike, and that there is a difference between those who rise above law and those who burst through it. Said Mary, "Freedom without a sense of responsibility, is license, and license is a ship at sea without rudder or sail." That the careless, mentally slipshod, restless, and morally unsound should look upon her as one of them caused Mary more pain than the criticisms of the unco guid. It was this persistent pointing out by the crowd, as well as regard for the unborn, that caused William and Mary to go quietly in the month of March, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, to Saint Pancras Church and be married all according to the laws of England.

Godwin wrote of the mating thus: "The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refined quality of love. It grew with equal advances in the minds of each. It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before and who was after. One sex did not take the priority which long-established custom had awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either part can assume to have been the principal agent in the affair. When, in the course of things, the disclosure came, there was nothing, in a manner, for either party to disclose to the other. There was no period of throes and resolute explanation attendant on the tale. It was friendship melting into love."

Mary was now happier than she had ever been before in her life. She wrote to a friend: "My bark has at last glided out upon the smooth waters. Married to a man whom I respect, revere and love, who understands my highest flights of fancy, and with whom complete companionship exists, my literary success assured, and the bugaboo of poverty at last removed, you can imagine how serene is my happiness." But this time of joy was to be short.

She died three months later, September Tenth, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, leaving behind her a baby girl eleven days old.

This girl, grown to womanhood, was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and without whom the name of Shelley would be to us unknown.

In writing of the mother who died in giving her birth, Mary Shelley says: "Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those rare beings who appear once, perhaps, in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray which no difference of opinion nor chance of circumstance can cloud. Her genius was undeniable. She had been bred in the hard school of adversity, and having experienced the sorrows entailed on the poor and oppressed, an earnest desire was kindled within her to diminish these sorrows.

"Her sound understanding, her intrepidity, her sensibility and eager sympathy, stamped all her writings with force and truth, and endowed them with a tender charm that enchants while it enlightens. Many years have passed since that beating heart has been laid in the cold, still grave, but no one who has ever seen her speaks of her without enthusiastic love and veneration. Was there discord among friends or relatives, she stood by the weaker party, and by her earnest appeals and kindliness awoke latent affection, and healed all wounds. Open as day to melting charity, with a heart brimming with generous affection, yearning for sympathy, helpful, hopeful and self-reliant, such was Mary Wollstonecraft." And here let us leave her.

DANTE AND BEATRICE

What should be said of him can not be said;
By too great splendor is his name attended;
To blame is easier those who him offended,
Than reach the faintest glory round him shed.
This man descended to the doomed and dead
For our instruction; then to God ascended;
Heaven opened wide to him its portals splendid,
Who from his country's, closed against him, fled.
Ungrateful land! To its own prejudice
Nurse of his fortunes; and this showeth well,
That the most perfect, most of grief shall see.
Among a thousand proofs let one suffice,
That as his exile hath no parallel,
Ne'er walked the earth a greater man than he.

—Longfellow

It was George Bernard Shaw who placed in the pillory of letters what he was pleased to call "The Disagreeable Girl."

And he has done the deed by a dry-plate, quick-shutter process in a way that surely lays him liable for criminal libel in society's assize.

I say society's assize advisedly, because it is only in society that the Disagreeable Girl plays a prominent part, assuming the center of the stage. Society, in the society sense, is built on vacuity, its favors being for those who reveal a fine capacity to waste and consume. Those who would write their names high on society's honor-roll need not be either useful or intelligent—they need only seem.

And this gives the Disagreeable Girl her opportunity. In the paper-box factory she would have to make good; Cluett, Coon and Company ask for results; the stage demands a modicum at least of intellect, in addition to shape; but society asks for nothing but pretense, and the palm is awarded to palaver.

But do not, if you please, imagine that the Disagreeable Girl does not wield an influence.

That is the very point: her influence is so far-reaching that George Bernard Shaw, giving cross-sections of life, in the form of dramas, can not write a play and leave her out.

She is ubiquitous, omniscient and omnipresent—is the Disagreeable Girl. She is a disappointment to her father, a humiliation to her mother, a pest to brothers and sisters, and when she finally marries, she saps the inspiration of her husband and often converts a proud and ambitious man into a weak and cowardly cur.

Only in society does the Disagreeable Girl shine: everywhere else she is an abject failure. The much-vaunted Gibson Girl is a kind of deluxe edition of Shaw's Disagreeable Girl. The Gibson Girl lolls, loafs, pouts, weeps, talks back, lies in wait, dreams, eats, drinks, sleeps and yawns. She rides in a coach in a red jacket, plays golf in a secondary sexual sweater, dawdles on a hotel veranda, and tum-tums on a piano, but you never hear of her doing a useful thing or saying a wise one. She reveals a beautiful capacity for avoiding all useful effort.

Gibson gilds the Disagreeable Girl. Shaw paints her as she is. In the "Doll's House" Henrik Ibsen has given us Nora Hebler, a Disagreeable Girl of mature age, who beyond a doubt first set George Bernard Shaw a-thinking. Then looking about, Shaw saw her at every turn in every stage of her moth-and-butterfly existence.

And the Disagreeable Girl being everywhere, Shaw, dealer in human character, can not write a play and leave her out, any more than Turner could paint a picture and leave man out, or Paul Veronese produce a canvas and omit the dog.

The Disagreeable Girl is a female of the genus homo persuasion, built around a digestive apparatus with marked marshmallow proclivities.

She is, moreover, pretty, pug-nosed, poetical, pert and pink; and at first glance to the unwary, she shows signs of gentleness and intelligence. Her age is anywhere from eighteen to twenty-eight. At twenty-eight she begins to evolve into something else, and her capacity for harm is largely curtailed, because by this time spirit has written itself in her form and features, and the grossness and animality which before were veiled are now becoming apparent. Habit writes itself on the face, and the body is an automatic recording-machine.

To have a beautiful old age, you must live a beautiful youth, for we ourselves are posterity and every man is his own ancestor. I am today what I am because I was yesterday what I was.

The Disagreeable Girl is always pretty—at least she has been told she is pretty, and she fully accepts the dictum. She has also been told she is clever, and she thinks she is. The actual fact is she is only "sassy."

The fine flaring-up of youth has set sex rampant, but she is not "immoral," except in her mind. She has caution to the verge of cowardice, and so she is "sans reproche." In public she pretends to be dainty; but alone, or with those for whose good opinion she does not care, she is gross, coarse and sensual in every feature of her life. She eats too much, does not exercise enough, and considers it amusing to let others wait upon her, and do for her the things she should do for herself. Her room is a jumble of disorder, a fantasy of dirty clothes, a sequinarium of unmentionables—that is, if the care of it is left to herself. The one gleam of hope for her lies in the fact that out of shame she will allow no visitor to enter the apartment if she can help it. Concrete selfishness is her chief mark. She avoids responsibility; sidesteps every duty that calls for honest effort; is secretive, untruthful, indolent, evasive and dishonest.

"What are you eating?" asks Nora Hebler's husband as she enters the room, not expecting to see him.

"Nothing," is the answer, and she hides the box of bonbons behind her, and presently backs out of the room.

I think Mr. Hebler had no business to ask her what she was eating: no man should ask any woman such a question—and really it was no difference anyway. But Nora is always on the defensive, and fabricates when it is necessary—and when it isn't, just through habit. She will hide a letter written by her grandmother, as quickly and deftly as if it were a missive from a guilty lover. The habit of her life is one of suspicion; for, being inwardly guilty herself, she suspects everybody, although it is quite likely that crime with her has never broken through thought into deed. Nora rifles her husband's pockets, reads his notebook, examines his letters, and when he goes on a trip she spends the day checking up his desk, for her soul delights in duplicate keys.

At times she lets drop hints of knowledge concerning little nothings that are none of hers, just to mystify folks. She does strange, annoying things, simply to see what others will do.

In degree, Nora's husband fixed the vice of finesse in her nature, for even a "good" woman accused parries by the use of trickery and wins her point by the artistry of the bagnio. Women and men are never really far apart anyway, and women are what men have made them.

We are all just getting rid of our shackles: listen closely anywhere, even among honest and intellectual people, if such there be, and you can detect the rattle of chains.

The Disagreeable Girl's mind and soul have not kept pace with her body. Yesterday she was a slave, sold in Circassian mart, and freedom to her is so new and strange that she does not know what to do with it.

The tragedy she works, according to George Bernard Shaw, is through the fact that very often good men, blinded by the glamour of sex, imagine they love the Disagreeable Girl, when what they love is their own ideal.

Nature is both a trickster and a humorist and sets the will of the species beyond the discernment of the individual. The picador has to blindfold his horse in order to get him into the bull-ring, and likewise Dan Cupid exploits the myopic to a purpose.

For aught we know, the lovely Beatrice of Dante was only a Disagreeable Girl clothed in a poet's fancy. Fortunate, indeed, was Dante that he never knew her well enough to get undeceived, and so walked through life in love with love, sensitive, saintly, sweetly sad and divinely happy in his melancholy.

There be simple folks and many, who think that the tragedy of love lies in its being unrequited.

The fact is, the only genuinely unhappy love—the only tragedy—is when love wears itself out.

Thus tragedy consists in having your illusions shattered.

The love-story of Dante lies in the realm of illusion and represents an eternal type of affection. It is the love of a poet—a Pygmalion who loves his own creation. It is the love that is lost, but the things we lose or give away are the things we keep. That for which we clutch we lose.

Love like that of Dante still exists everywhere, and will until the end of time. One-sided loves are classic and know neither age nor place; and to a degree—let the fact be stated softly and never hereafter be so much as whispered—all good men and women have at some time loved one-sidedly, the beloved being as unaware of the love as a star is of the astronomer who discovers it.

This kind of love, carried on discreetly, is on every hand, warming into life the divine germs of art, poetry and philosophy. Of it the world seldom hears. It creates no scandal, never is mentioned in court proceedings, nor is it featured by the newspapers. Indeed, the love of Dante would have been written in water, were it not for the fact that the poet took the world into his confidence, as all poets do—for literature is only confession.

Many who have written of Dante, like Boccaccio and Rossetti, have shown as rare a creative ability as some claim Dante revealed in creating his Beatrice.

"Paint me with the moles on," said Lincoln to the portrait-man. I'll show Dante with moles, wrinkles and the downward curve of the corners of his mouth, duly recording the fact that the corners of his mouth did not turn down always.

I think, somewhere, I have encouraged the idea of women marrying the second time, and I have also given tangible reasons. Let me now say as much for men.

The father of Dante married and raised a family of seven. On the death of his wife he sought consolation for his sorrow in the love of a lass by the name of Bella—her family-name is to us unknown. They were married, and had one child, and this child was Dante.

Dante, at times, had a way of mourning over the fact that his father and mother ever met, but the world has never especially sympathized in this regret. Dante was born in the year Twelve Hundred Sixty-five, in the city of Florence, which was then the artistic and intellectual capital of the world.

Dante seemed to think that the best in his nature was derived from his mother, who was a most gentle, sensitive and refined spirit. Such a woman married to a man old enough to be her father is not likely to be absurdly happy. This has been said before, but it will bear repeating. Yet disappointment has its compensation, since it drives the mind on to the ideal, and thus is a powerful stimulant for the imagination. Deprive us of our heritage here, and we will conjure forth castles in Spain—you can not place an injunction on that!

Dante was not born in a castle, nor yet in a house with portcullis and battlements.

Time was when towers and battlements on buildings were something more than mere architectural appendenda. They had a positive use. Towers and courtyards were only for the nobility, and signified that the owner was beyond the reach of law; he could lock himself in and fight off the world, the flesh and the devil, if he wished.

Dante's father lived in a house that had neither tower nor court that closed with iron gate. He was a lawyer, a hard-headed man who looked after estates, collected rents and gave advice to aristocratic nobodies for a consideration. He did not take snuff, for obvious reasons, but he was becomingly stout, carried a gold-headed cane or staff with a tassel on it, and struck this cane on the ground, coughing slightly, when about to give advice, as most really great lawyers do.

When little Durante—or Dante, as we call him—was nine years old, his father took him to a lawn fete held at the suburban home of Folco de Portinari, one of the lawyer's rich clients.

Now Signor Portinari in social station was beyond Alighieri the lawyer, and of course nobody for a moment suspected that the dark-skinned, half-scared little boy, clutching his father's forefinger as they walked, was going to write "The Divine Comedy." No one paid any particular attention to the father and child, as they strolled beneath the trees, rested on the benches, and were served chocolate and cheese-straws by the servants.

But on this occasion the boy caught a passing glimpse of Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of the host. The girl was just nine years old: the boy must have been told this by his father as he pointed out the fair one. The boy did not speak to her nor did she speak to him: this was quite out of the question, for they were on a totally different social plane.

Amid the dim lights of the flaming torches he saw her—just for an instant! The whole surroundings were strangely unreal, but well calculated to impress the youthful imagination, and out of it all the boy carried with him this vision of loveliness.

In his "New Life"—what an appropriate title for a love-story!—Dante tells of this first sight of the beloved somewhat thus: "Nine times already since my birth had the heaven of light returned to the selfsame point almost, as concerns its own revolution, when first the glorious lady of my mind was made manifest to my eyes, even she who was called Beatrice by many who knew not wherefore. She had already been in this life so long as that, within her time the starry heaven had moved toward the Eastern quarter one of the twelve parts of the degree; so that she appeared to me at the beginning of her ninth year, and I saw her almost at the end of my ninth year. Her dress on that day was of the most noble color, a subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited her very tender age. At that moment, I say most truly that the spirit of life, which has its dwelling in the secretest chamber of my heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith; and in trembling it said these words: Here is a deity stronger than I who coming shall rule over me."

Nine was a sacred number with Dante. He was nine years old when he first saw his lady-love, and she too was nine, having not yet reached the age of indiscretion.

Nine years were to elapse before he was to speak to her. It is quite possible that he had caught glimpses of her in the interval, at church.

Churches have their uses as trysting-places for the unquenched spirit: vows are repeated there that have no witnesses and do not go into the register. There lovers meet in soul, and feed upon a glance, when heads are bowed in prayer. Love lends a deep religious air to the being, and when we are in love we love God. At other times we only fear Him.

I am told that there be young men and maidens fair who walk on air and live in paradise until Sunday comes again, all on account of a loving look into eyes that look love again, in the dim religious light while the music plays soft and low.

The lover watched his graceful maid
As mid the virgin train she strayed,
Nor knew her beauty's best attire
Was woven still in the snow-white choir.

And where is the gray-bearded prophet who has yet been wise enough to tell us where love ends and religion begins! But in all these nine years Beatrice and Dante had never met. She had not heard his voice, nor he hers—only glances, or a hand lifted in a way that spoke tomes. He had developed into a dark, dashing youth, given to falconry, painting and music. He had worked with Cimabue, the father of Italian art, and had been chum of Giotto, to whom all cherubim and seraphim trace.

At that time people with money who wanted to educate their sons sent them out, at what seems to us a very tender age, to travel and tramp the earth alone. They were remittance-men who shifted from university to university, and took lessons in depravity, being educated by the boys.

Dean Pluntre says that there were universities in the Middle Ages at Padua, Bologna, Paris and Oxford carried on in a very desultory way by pious monks, where the boys were divided by nationalities, so as to afford a kind of police system—Italian, Spanish, French and English.

They caroused, occasionally fought, studied when they felt like it, and made love to married women—all girls being under lock and key for safe-keeping.

So there you get the evolution of the modern university: a mendicant monastery where boys were sent, in the hope that they might absorb a little of the religious spirit and a desire to know.

Finally, there were enough students so that they organized cliques, clubs and secret societies, and by a process of natural selection governed themselves, as well as visited punishment upon offenders.

Next, on account of a laxity of morals and an indifference to books, a military system of discipline was enforced: lights had to be out at ten o'clock, and a student caught off the grounds without leave was punished. The teacher was a vicarious soldier. At that time each school had a prison attached, of which the "carcer" at Heidelberg is the surviving type. Up to the Sixteenth Century, every university was a kind of castle or fort, and the students might at any time be compelled to do military duty. The college had its towers for fighting-men, its high walls, its fortressed fronts and iron gates. These gates and walls still survive in rudimentary form, and the sixteen-foot spiked steel fence at Harvard is the type of a condition that once was an actual necessity: the place was a law unto itself, paid no taxes, and at any time might be raided. Colleges yet pay no taxes and are also quasi-mendicant institutions.

It was not until well into the Sixteenth Century that requirements, examinations, system and discipline began to dawn upon the world. Before that, a student was a kind of troubadour, a cross between a monk and a crusader, a knight-errant of love and letters, and the moral code for him did not apply. An argument can be made for his chivalric tendencies, and his pretense for learning had its place, for affectation is better than indifference. The roistering student is not wholly bad.

Poetry and love-making were to the velvet-breeched youth the real business of life. Like knights in armor, he often wore the colors of a lady who merely smiled at him from a latticed window. If she dropped for him her glove or handkerchief, he was in the seventh heaven. As his intents were not honorable nor his purpose marriage, it made no difference whether the lady was married or single, young or old. Whether the love remained upon a Platonic and purely poetic basis depended, of course, entirely upon the lady and her watchful relatives. If the family were poor and the lover rich, these things might have a bearing. We hear of alliances in those days, not dishonorable, where the husband was complacent and looked upon it as a distinction to have worthy scions of greatness pay court to his wife. Such men were referred to as "fribblers" or "tame-cats." The woman was often much older than the alleged student, and this seems to have been no disadvantage, for charms o'erripe are oft alluring to a certain type of youth.

Such things now would lead to headlines in the daily papers and snapshots of all parties concerned, followed by divorce-court proceedings. Then, even among honorable husbands, the only move was to hire an extra Pinkerton duenna to attend the fair one, and to smile in satisfaction over the possession of a wife so much coveted—the joy of all ownership being largely the ability to excite envy.

College rowdyism, cane-rushes, duels, bloody Monday, the fag system and hazings are all surviving traditions of these so-called universities where people who had the price sent their sons into the pedagogic bull-pen.

As, for centuries, youths who were destined for the priesthood were the only ones educated, so the monks were the first teachers, and the monastery was the college.

In the Twelfth Century a college was merely a monkery that took in boarders, and learning was acquired by absorption.

No records were kept of the students—they simply paid a small fee, were given a badge and attended lectures when they got ready.

Some students stayed and studied for years, thinking the business of life was to cram with facts. Such bachelor grubbers with fixed incomes, like pensioners in a soldiers' home, old and gray, are now to be seen occasionally in European universities, sticklers for technicalities, hot after declensions, and happy when they close in on a new exception to a Greek verb, giving it no quarter. When they come to die, they leave earth with but a single regret: they have never been able fully to compass the ablative. But the rough-and-tumble student was the rule, with nose deep into stein, exaggerating little things into great, making woful ballad to his mistress' eyebrow.

Such was Milord Hamlet, to whom young Dante bears a strange resemblance.

A university like this, where the students governed themselves, and the duties of the faculty consisted largely in protecting the property, had its advantages. We will come back to self-government yet, but higher up in the scale. It was like a big country school, in a country town, where lessons in self-reliance are handed out with the bark on. The survival of the fittest prevails, and out of the mass emerges now and then a strong man who makes his mark upon the times.

Dante was back home in Florence from his sojourn abroad, a bit of a dandy no doubt, with a becoming dash and a touch of sophomoric boldness. He had not forgotten Beatrice Portinari: often had he thought of her, the princess of his dreams, and all the dames he had met had been measured with her as a standard.

She had been married about a year before to a rich banker, Simone de Bardi. This did not trouble Dante: she was too far removed from him to be an actual reality, and so he just waived her husband and dismissed him with a shrug. Beside that, young married women have a charm all their own; they are wiser than maidens, more companionable; innocence is not wholly commendable—at least, not to a university student.

And now face to face Dante and Beatrice meet. It is the first, the last, the only time they are to meet on earth. They meet. She is walking with two women friends, one on each side.

She is clothed in pure white—her friends in darker raiment. She looks like an angel of light. Dante and Beatrice are not expected to meet—there is no time for embarrassment. How did she know that young Dante Alighieri had returned—she must have been dreaming of him—thinking of him! There she stands right before him—tall, graceful, intellectual, smiling. Eyes look into eyes and flash recognition. The earth seems to swirl under Dante's feet. He uncovers his head and is about to sink to his knees, but she sustains him with a word of welcome and holds out the tips of her fingers for him to touch.

She is older now than he: she is married, and a married woman of eighteen may surely reassure a boy who is only eighteen! "We have missed you from the church and from our streets—you look well, Gentle Sir! Welcome back to our Florence! Good evening!"

The three women move on: Dante tries to, but stands rooted like one of those human trees he was afterward to see in Purgatory. He follows her with his eyes, and just once she looks back and smiles as the three women are lost in the throng.

But that chance, unexpected meeting, the salutation and the smile were to write themselves into the "Vita Nuova." Dante had indeed begun a New Life.

The City of Florence at this time was prosperous. The churches had their pagan holidays, fetes and festivals, and gaiety was the rule.

Out at Vallambrosa and Fiesole, where the leaves fall, there were Courts of Love where poets chanted their lays and singers sang. In all this life Dante took a prominent part, for while he was not of noble birth he was of noble bearing.

There were rival political parties then in Florence, and instead of settling their difficulties at the polls they had recourse to the cobblestone and club.

When the Guelfs routed the Ghibellines from the city, Dante served as a soldier, or was sworn in as a deputy sheriff, and did some valiant fighting for the Guelfs, for which privilege he was to pay when the Ghibellines came back.

Just what his every-day occupation was we are not sure, but as he was admitted a member of the Guild of Apothecaries we assume that he clerked in a drugstore, and often expressed himself thus: "Lady, I am all out of liverwort today, but I have something just as good!"—and he read her a few stanzas from the "Vita Nuova," which he had just written behind the screen at the prescription-counter.

In the year Twelve Hundred Eighty-five, Charles of Anjou, brother of Saint Louis, came to Florence, and Dante was appointed one of the committee to look after his entertainment.

Charles was a man of intelligence and discrimination, a lover of letters and art. He and Dante became fast friends, and it seems Dante became a kind of honorary member of his court.

Dante could paint a little, he played on the harp, and he also recited his own poems. His love of Beatrice de Bardi was an open secret—all Florence knew of it. He had sung her beauty, her art, her intelligence in a way that made both locally famous.

He had written a poem on the sixty chief belles of Florence, and in this list he had not placed Beatrice first, but ninth. Just why he did this, unless to emphasize his favorite number, we do not know. In any event it made more talk than if he had placed her first.

And once at church where he had followed Beatrice, he made eyes openly at another lady, to distract the attention of the observing public. The plan worked so well that Beatrice, seeing the flirtation, shortly afterward met Dante and cut him dead, or, to use his own phrase, "withheld her salutation."

This caused the young man such bitter pain that he wrote a veiled poem, explaining the actual facts. These facts were that out of his great love for Beatrice, in order to protect her good name, he had openly made love to another.

I said that the fact that Beatrice had declined to speak to Dante as they passed by had caused him bitter pain. This is true; but after a few days the matter took on a new light. If Beatrice was indifferent to him, why should she be displeased when he had made eyes at another? She evidently was jealous, and Dante was in a paradise of delight, or in purgatory, or both, according to the way the wind sat.

There is no reason to suppose that Dante and Beatrice ever met and talked things over. She was closely guarded, and evidently ran no risk of smirching her good name by associating with a troubadour student. He could sing songs about her—this she could not help—but beyond this there was nothing doing.

Only once after this did they come near meeting. It was at a wedding-party where Dante had gone evidently without an invitation. He inwardly debated whether he should remain to the feast or not, and the ayes had it. He was about to be seated at the table, when a sudden sense of first heat and then cold came over him and he grasped his chair for support. The light seemed blinding. He closed his eyes, and then opened them; and looking up, on the opposite side of the room he saw his Beatrice!

A friend seeing his agitation and thinking him ill, led him forth into the open air and there chafed his icy fingers asking, "What can it be—what is the matter?"

And Dante answered, "Of a surety I have set my feet on a point of life beyond which he must not pass who would return!"

Immediately thereafter—probably the next day—Dante began a poem, very carefully thought out, in celebration of the beauty and virtue of Beatrice. He had written but one stanza when he tells us that, "The Lord God of Justice called my most gracious Lady to Himself." And Beatrice was dead, aged twenty-five years.

Through her death Dante was indeed wedded to her memory. He calls her the bride of his soul.

We can not resign from life gracefully. Work has to be performed, even when calamity comes, and we stand by an open grave and ask old Job's question, "If a man die shall he live again?"

Dante felt sure that Beatrice must live again in all her loveliness. "Heaven had need of her," he cries in his grief. And then again, "She belonged not here, and so God took her to Himself." At first he was dumb with sorrow, and then tears came to his relief, and a little later he eased his soul through expression: he indited an open letter, a kind of poetic proclamation to the citizens of Florence, in which he rehearsed their loss and offered them consolation in the thought that they now had a guardian angel in Heaven.

The lover, like an artist or skilled workman, always exaggerates the importance of his passion, and links his love with the universal welfare of mankind.

And stay! after all he may be right—who knows! So a year passed away in sadness, with a few bad turnings into sensuality, followed by repenting in verse. It was the anniversary of her death, and Dante was outlining angels to illustrate his sonnets wherein he apotheosized Beatrice. And behold! as he day-dreamed of his Beatrice sweet consolation came in double form. First he saw a gentle lady who looked very much like the lady he lost. Lovers are always looking for resemblances—on the street, in churches, at the theater or the concert, in travel—looking always, ever looking for the face and form of the beloved. Strange resemblances are observed—persons are followed—the gait, height, attire, carriage of the head are noted, and hearts beat fast!

So Dante saw a lady who seemed to have the same dignity of carriage, a like nobility of feature, a look as luminous and a glance as telling as those of Beatrice. Evidently he paid court to her with so much success that he turned from her and recriminated himself for having his passion aroused by a counterfeit. She looked the part, but her feet were clay and so were heart and head, and Dante turned again to his ideal, Beatrice in Heaven.

And with the turning came the thought of Paradise! He would visit Beatrice in Heaven, and she would meet him at the gates and guide the way. The visit was to be one personally conducted.

Every great and beautiful thing was once an unuttered thought; and we know the time and almost the place where Dante conceived the idea of "The Divine Comedy."

The new Beatrice he had found was only a plaster-of-Paris cast of the original: Dante's mind recoiled from her to the genuine—that is, to the intangible—which proves that even commonplace women have their uses. At this time, while he was revolving the nebulous "Commedia" in his mind, he read Cicero's "Essay on Friendship," and dived deep into the philosophy of Epictetus and Plato. Then he printed a card in big letters and placed it on his table where he could see it continually: "Philosophy is the cure for love!"

But it wasn't—except for a few days when he wrote some stanzas directed to the world, declaring that his former poems referring to Beatrice pictured her merely as "Philosophy, the beautiful woman, daughter of the Great Emperor of the Universe." He declared that all of his odes to his gentle lady were odes to Philosophy, to which all wise men turn for consolation in time of trouble.

Nothing matters much—pish! It was the struggle of the poet and the good man, trying to convince himself that he travels fastest who travels alone.

Dante must have held the stern and placid pose of Plato, the confirmed bachelor, for a full week, then tears came and melted his artificial granite.

And as for Plato, the confirmed bachelor, legend has it that he was confirmed by a woman.

In the train of Boccaccio traveled a nephew of Dante who had his illustrious uncle's interesting history at his tongue's end. By this nephew we are told that the marriage of Dante and Gemma Donati, in Twelve Hundred and Ninety-two, when Dante was twenty-seven, was a little matter arranged by the friends of both parties. Dante was dreamy, melancholy and unreliable: marriage would sober his poetic debauch and cause him to settle down!

Ruskin, it will be remembered, was also looked after by the matchmakers in much the same way.

So Dante was married. Some say that his wife was the gentle lady who looked like Beatrice, but this is pure conjecture. Four children were born to them in seven years. One of these was named Beatrice, which seems to prove that the wife of Dante was aware of his great passion. One of the sons became a college professor, and wrote a commentary on "The Commedia," and also an unneeded defense of his father's character and motives in making love to a married lady.

Dante was a man of influence in the affairs of the city. He occupied civic offices of distinction, wrote addresses and occasionally poems, in which he glorified his friends and referred scathingly to his political adversaries.

Gemma must have been a woman of more than average brain and intelligence, for when her husband was banished from Florence by the successful Ghibellines, she kept her little family together, worked hard, educated her children, and it is said by Boccaccio lived honorably and indulged in no repining.