This lady, who represents the Active life to Dante’s waking eyes, as Leah had done in his vision, and whom Dante afterwards. Canto XXXIII 119, calls Matilda, is generally supposed by the commentators to be the celebrated Countess Matilda, daughter of Boniface, Count of Tuscany, and wife of Guelf, of the house of Suabia. Of this marriage Villani, IV 21, gives a very strange account, which, if true, is a singular picture of the times. Napier, Florentine History , I Ch. 4 and 6, gives these glimpses of the Countess:⁠—