Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal (Complete‪)‬

Dante was born in the spring of the year 1265. Benvenuta da Immola calls his father a lawyer; but little more is recorded of him except that he was twice married, and left two sons and a daughter, at an early age, to the guardianship of relatives. Dante (abridged from Durante) was born of Bella, his father's second wife, of whom, during her pregnancy, Boccaccio relates a very significant dream,—on what authority he does not say, and with what truth the reader may judge for himself. She imagined herself sitting under the shade of a lofty laurel, in the midst of a green meadow, by the side of a brilliant fountain. Here she was delivered of a boy, who, in as little time as might easily happen in a dream, grew up into a man before her eyes, by feeding upon the berries that fell from the tree, and drinking of the pure stream which watered its roots. Presently he had become a shepherd; but, climbing too eagerly up the stem to gather some leaves from the laurel, with the fruit of which he had been hitherto nourished, he fell headlong to the ground, and on rising appeared no longer a man, but a magnificent peacock. It would be aggravating the offence of wasting time by quoting such a fable, were we to give the obvious interpretation. This, however, the great Boccaccio has done with most magniloquent gravity,—a task for which, of all men, he was no doubt the most competent, as it is probable that no soul living (the lady herself not excepted) besides himself was in the secret either of the vision or the moral. One point of the latter, which could not easily be guessed, may be mentioned; namely, that the spots on the peacock's tail (the hundred eyes of Argus) foreshowed the hundred cantos of the "Divina Commedia." The ingenious author of the Decameron may have borrowed the idea of this dream from Dante's own allusion to the laurel and its leaves,—the meed of poets and of princes,—in his preposterous invocation of Apollo at the commencement of the "Paradiso."