Thus Hans Castorp came to hear something about Dante, and certainly from the lips of authority. He was not too much inclined to believe implicitly all Settembrini said; he considered him too much of a windbag for that. Still it was an interesting conception, this of Dante as the wide-awake citizen of a great metropolis. And now Settembrini went on to speak of himself, and to explain how the tendencies of his immediate forbears, the political from his grandfather, the humanistic from his father, had united in his own person to produce the writer and independent man of letters. For literature was after all nothing else than the combination of humanism and politics; a conjunction the more immediate in that humanism itself was politics and politics humanism. Hans Castorp did his best at this point to listen and comprehend, in the hope of finally learning wherein had consisted the crass ignorance of Magnus the brewer, and finding out what else literature actually was, above and beyond “beautiful characters.” Settembrini asked his audience whether they had ever heard of Brunetto, Brunetto Latini, a Florentine notary, who about the year 1250 had written a book on the subject of the virtues and the vices. He it was who had sharpened the wits of the Florentines, taught them the art of language, and how to guide their state according to the rules of politics.