VII. GOTHIC PALACES 307

thenceforward in Europe; and I suppose that one of its peculiar characteristics was elsewhere, as assuredly in Florence, a singular simplicity in domestic life:¹

“I saw Bellincion Berti walk abroad

In leathern girdle, and a clasp of bone;

And, with no artful colouring on her cheeks,

His lady leave the glass. The sons I saw

Of Nerli and of Vecchio, well content

With unrobed jerkin, and their good dames handling

The spindle and the flax....

One waked to tend the cradle, hushing it

With sounds that lulled the parents’ infancy:

Another, with her maidens, drawing off

The tresses from the distaff, lectured them

Old tales of Troy, and Fesole, and Rome.”*

§ 42. Such, then, is the simple fact at Venice, that from the beginning of the thirteenth century there is found a

* It is generally better to read ten lines of any poet in the original language, however painfully, than ten cantos of a translation. But an exception may be made in favour of Cary’s Dante. If no poet ever was liable to lose more in translation, none was ever so carefully translated; and I hardly know whether most to admire the rigid fidelity, or the sweet and solemn harmony, of Cary’s verse. There is hardly a fault in the fragment quoted above, except the word “lectured” for Dante’s beautiful “favoleggiava;” and even in this case, joining the first words of the following line, the translation is strictly literal. It is true that the conciseness and the rivulet-like melody of Dante must continually be lost; but if I could only read English, and had to choose, for a library narrowed by poverty, between Cary’s Dante and our own original Milton, I should choose Cary without an instant’s pause.2

¹ [The quotation following is from the Paradiso, xv. 106-119. A footnote to the passage in Cary’s Dante gives some interesting particulars from G. Villani of Florentine simplicity in costume at this period (A. D. 1259).]

² [At the time when he was writing this book at Venice, Ruskin was reading Milton through and also Dante, as always. For his Milton readings see passages from his letters cited above, pp. 87, 112; in another letter to his father, he enters into a comparison between Milton and Dante:-

“April 23 [1852].-... I quite agree with you in your fondness for Milton’s pieces of softer verse; still I think both Dante and Shakespeare beat him far in true tenderness: the passage you quote from Dante, and many others like it, are the most truly noble pieces of tenderness that the world possesses. I think it is Byron who says-and it is one of the truest things that he ever said-that there is no tenderness like Dante’s [see Vol. IV. p. 257]. It owes a peculiar charm to its shortness; it is always as if the words had been stopped by tears. Shakespeare comes near him sometimes, but never quite touches him. I think in the setting forth of a sublime vision

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