Note 175 — CANTO I.

Feltro and Feltro, etc.: Who the deliverer was that Dante prophesies the coming of is not known, and perhaps never can be. Against the claims of Can Grande of Verona the objection is that, at any date which can reasonably be assigned for the publication of the Inferno, he had done nothing to justify such bright hopes of his future career. There seems proof, too, that till the Paradiso was written Dante entertained no great respect for the Scala family (Purg. xvi. 118, xviii. 121). Neither is Verona, or the widest territory over which Can Grande ever ruled, at all described by saying it lay between Feltro and Feltro.—I have preferred to translate nazi-one as birth rather than as nation or people. ‘The birth of the deliverer will be found to have been between feltro and feltro.’ Feltro, as Dante wrote it, would have no capital letter; and according to an old gloss the deliverer is to be of humble birth; feltro being the name of a poor sort of cloth. This interpretation I give as a curiosity more than anything else; for the most competent critics have decided against it, or ignored it.—Henry of Luxemburg, chosen Emperor in November 1308, is an old claimant for the post of the allegorical veltro or greyhound. On him Dante’s hopes were long set as the man who should ‘save Italy;’ and it seems not out of place to draw attention to what is said of him by John Villani, the contemporary and fellow-townsman of Dante: ‘He was of a magnanimous nature, though, as regarded his family, of poor extraction’ (Cronica, ix. 1). Whatever may be made of the Feltros, the description in the text of the deliverer as one superior to all personal ambition certainly answers better to Dante’s ideal of a righteous Emperor than to the character of a partisan leader like Uguccione della Faggiuola, or an ambitious prince like Can Grande.