Produced by Stan Goodman, Jayam Subramanian and PG Distributed

Proofreaders

STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS: WITH LIVES OF THE WRITERS.

BY LEIGH HUNT.

IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I.

MDCCCXLVI.

TO SIR PERCY SHELLEY, BART.

MY DEAR SIR PERCY,

As I know no man who surpasses yourself either in combining a love of the most romantic fiction with the coolest good sense, or in passing from the driest metaphysical questions to the heartiest enjoyment of humour,—I trust that even a modesty so true as yours will not grudge me the satisfaction of inscribing these volumes with your name.

That you should possess such varieties of taste is no wonder, considering what an abundance of intellectual honours you inherit; nor might the world have been the better for it, had they been tastes, and nothing more. But that you should inherit also that zeal for justice to mankind, which has become so Christian a feature in the character of the age, and that you should include in that zeal a special regard for the welfare of your Father's Friend, are subjects of constant pleasurable reflection to

Your obliged and affectionate

LEIGH HUNT.

PREFACE.

The purpose of these volumes is, to add to the stock of tales from the Italian writers; to retain as much of the poetry of the originals as it is in the power of the writer's prose to compass; and to furnish careful biographical notices of the authors. There have been several collections of stories from the Novellists of Italy, but none from the Poets; and it struck me that prose versions from these, of the kind here offered to the public, might not be unwillingly received. The stories are selected from the five principal narrative poets, Dante, Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso; they comprise the most popular of such as are fit for translation; are reduced into one continuous narrative, when diffused and interrupted, as in the instances of those of Angelica, and Armida; are accompanied with critical and explanatory notes; and, in the case of Dante, consist of an abstract of the poet's whole work. The volumes are, furthermore, interspersed with the most favourite morceaux of the originals, followed sometimes with attempts to versify them; and in the Appendix, for the furtherance of the study of the Italian language, are given entire stories, also in the original, and occasionally rendered in like manner. The book is particularly intended for such students or other lovers of the language as are pleased with any fresh endeavours to recommend it; and, at the same time, for such purely English readers as wish to know something about Italian poetry, without having leisure to cultivate its acquaintance.

I did not intend in the first instance to depart from the plan of selection in the case of Dante; but when I considered what an extraordinary person he was,—how intense is every thing which he says,—how widely he has re-attracted of late the attention of the world,—how willingly perhaps his poem might be regarded by the reader as being itself one continued story (which, in fact, it is), related personally of the writer,—and lastly, what a combination of difficulties have prevented his best translators in verse from giving the public a just idea of his almost Scriptural simplicity,—I began to think that an abstract of his entire work might possibly be looked upon as supplying something of a desideratum. I am aware that nothing but verse can do perfect justice to verse; but besides the imperfections which are pardonable, because inevitable, in all such metrical endeavours, the desire to impress a grand and worshipful idea of Dante has been too apt to lead his translators into a tone and manner the reverse of his passionate, practical, and creative style—a style which may be said to write things instead of words; and thus to render every word that is put out of its place, or brought in for help and filling up, a misrepresentation. I do not mean to say, that he himself never does any thing of the sort, or does not occasionally assume too much of the oracle and the schoolmaster, in manner as well as matter; but passion, and the absence of the superfluous, are the chief characteristics of his poetry. Fortunately, this sincerity of purpose and utterance in Dante render him the least pervertible of poets in a sincere prose translation; and, since I ventured on attempting one, I have had the pleasure of meeting with an express recommendation of such a version in an early number of the Edinburgh Review.[1]

The abstract of Dante, therefore, in these volumes (with every deprecation that becomes me of being supposed to pretend to give a thorough idea of any poetry whatsoever, especially without its metrical form) aspires to be regarded as, at all events, not exhibiting a false idea of the Dantesque spirit in point of feeling and expression. It is true, I have omitted long tedious lectures of scholastic divinity, and other learned absurdities of the time, which are among the bars to the poem's being read through, even in Italy (which Foscolo tells us is never the case); and I have compressed the work in other passages not essentially necessary to the formation of a just idea of the author. But quite enough remains to suggest it to the intelligent; and in no instance have I made additions or alterations. There is warrant—I hope I may say letter—for every thing put down. Dante is the greatest poet for intensity that ever lived; and he excites a corresponding emotion in his reader—I wish I could say, always on the poet's side; but his ferocious hates and bigotries too often tempt us to hate the bigot, and always compel us to take part with the fellow-creatures whom he outrages. At least, such is their effect on myself. Nor will he or his worshippers suffer us to criticise his faults with mere reference to the age in which he lived. I should have been glad to do so; but the claims made for him, even by himself, will not allow it. We are called upon to look on him as a divine, a prophet, an oracle in all respects for all time. Such a man, however, is the last whom a reporter is inclined to misrepresent. We respect his sincerity too much, ferocious and arrogant though it be; and we like to give him the full benefit of the recoil of his curses and maledictions. I hope I have not omitted one. On the other hand, as little have I closed my feelings against the lovely and enchanting sweetness which this great semi-barbarian sometimes so affectingly utters. On those occasions he is like an angel enclosed for penance in some furious giant, and permitted to weep through the creature's eyes.

The stories from goodnatured Pulci I have been obliged to compress for other reasons—chiefly their excessive diffuseness. A paragraph of the version will sometimes comprise many pages. Those of Boiardo and Ariosto are more exact; and the reader will be good enough to bear in mind, that nothing is added to any of the poets, different as the case might seem here and there on comparison with the originals. An equivalent for whatever is said is to be found in some part of the context—generally in letter, always in spirit. The least characteristically exact passages are some in the love-scenes of Tasso; for I have omitted the plays upon words and other corruptions in style, in which that poet permitted himself to indulge. But I have noticed the circumstance in the comment. In other respects, I have endeavoured to make my version convey some idea of the different styles and genius of the writers,—of the severe passion of Dante; of the overflowing gaiety and affecting sympathies of Pulci, several of whose passages in the Battle of Roncesvalles are masterpieces of pathos; of the romantic and inventive elegance of Boiardo; the great cheerful universality of Ariosto, like a healthy anima mundi; and the ambitious irritability, the fairy imagination, and tender but somewhat effeminate voluptuousness of the poet of Armida and Rinaldo. I do not pretend that prose versions of passages from these writers can supersede the necessity of metrical ones, supposing proper metrical ones attainable. They suffice for them, in some respects, less than for Dante, the manner in their case being of more importance to the effect. But with all due respect to such translators as Harrington, Rose, and Wiffen, their books are not Ariosto and Tasso, even in manner. Harrington, the gay "godson" of Queen Elizabeth, is not always unlike Ariosto; but when not in good spirits he becomes as dull as if her majesty had frowned on him. Rose was a man of wit, and a scholar; yet he has undoubtedly turned the ease and animation of his original into inversion and insipidity. And Wiffen, though elegant and even poetical, did an unfortunate thing for Tasso, when he gave an additional line and a number of paraphrastic thoughts to a stanza already tending to the superfluous. Fairfax himself, who, upon the whole, and with regard to a work of any length, is the best metrical translator our language has seen, and, like Chapman, a genuine poet, strangely aggravated the sins of prettiness and conceit in his original, and added to them a love of tautology amounting to that of a lawyer. As to Hoole, he is below criticism; and other versions I have not happened to see. Now if I had no acquaintance with the Italian language, I confess I would rather get any friend who had, to read to me a passage out of Dante, Tasso, or Ariosto, into the first simple prose that offered itself, than go to any of the above translators for a taste of it, Fairfax excepted; and we have seen with how much allowance his sample would have to be taken. I have therefore, with some restrictions, only ventured to do for the public what I would have had a friend do for myself.

The Critical and Biographical Notices I did not intend to make so long at first; but the interest grew upon me; and I hope the reader will regard some of them—Dante's and Tasso's in particular—as being "stories" themselves, after their kind,—"stories, alas, too true;" "romances of real life." The extraordinary character of Dante, which is personally mixed up with his writings beyond that of any other poet, has led me into references to his church and creed, unavoidable at any time in the endeavour to give a thorough estimate of his genius, and singularly demanded by certain phenomena of the present day. I hold those phenomena to be alike feeble and fugitive; but only so by reason of their being openly so proclaimed; for mankind have a tendency to the absurd, if their imaginations are not properly directed; and one of the uses of poetry is, to keep the faculty in a healthy state, and cause it to know its duties. Dante, in the fierce egotism of his passions, and the strange identification of his knowledge with all that was knowable, would fain have made his poetry both a sword against individuals, and a prop for the support of the superstition that corrupted them. This was reversing the duty of a Christian and a great man; and there happen to be existing reasons why it is salutary to chew that he had no right to do so, and must not have his barbarism confounded with his strength. Machiavelli was of opinion, that if Christianity had not reverted to its first principles, by means of the poverty and pious lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic,[2] the faith would have been lost. It may have been; but such are not the secrets of its preservation in times of science and progression, when the spirit of inquiry has established itself among all classes, and nothing is taken for granted, as it used to be. A few persons here and there, who confound a small superstitious reaction in England with the reverse of the fact all over the rest of Europe, may persuade themselves, if they please, that the world has not advanced in knowledge for the last three centuries, and so get up and cry aloud to us out of obsolete horn-books; but the community laugh at them. Every body else is inquiring into first principles, while they are dogmatising on a forty-ninth proposition. The Irish themselves, as they ought to do, care more for their pastors than for the Pope; and if any body wishes to know what is thought of his Holiness at head-quarters, let him consult the remarkable and admirable pamphlet which has lately issued from the pen of Mr. Mazzini.[3] I have the pleasure of knowing excellent Roman Catholics; I have suffered in behalf of their emancipation, and would do so again to-morrow; but I believe that if even their external form of Christianity has any chance of survival three hundred years hence, it will have been owing to the appearance meanwhile of some extraordinary man in power, who, in the teeth of worldly interests, or rather in charitable and sage inclusion of them, shall have proclaimed that the time had arrived for living in the flower of Christian charity, instead of the husks and thorns which may have been necessary to guard it. If it were possible for some new and wonderful Pope to make this change, and draw a line between these two Christian epochs, like that between the Old and New Testaments, the world would feel inclined to prostrate itself again and for ever at the feet of Rome. In a catholic state of things like that, delighted should I be, for one, to be among the humblest of its communicants. How beautiful would their organs be then! how ascending to an unperplexing Heaven their incense! how unselfish their salvation! how intelligible their talk about justice and love! It would be far more easy, however, for the Church of England to do this than the Church of Rome; since the former would not feel itself hampered with pretensions to infallibility. A Church once reformed, may reform itself again and again, till it remove every blemish in the way of its perfection. And God grant this may be the lot of the Church of my native country. Its beautiful old ivied places of worship would then want no harmony of accordance with its gentle and tranquil scenery; no completeness of attraction to the reflecting and the kind.

But if Charity (and by Charity I do not mean mere toleration, or any other pretended right to permit others to have eyes like ourselves, but whatever the delightful Greek word implies of good and lovely), if this truly and only divine consummation of all Christian doctrine be not thought capable of taking a form of belief "strong" enough, apart from threats that revolt alike the heart and the understanding, Superstition must look out for some new mode of dictation altogether; for the world is outgrowing the old.

* * * * *

I cannot, in gratitude for the facilities afforded to myself, as well as for a more obvious and public reason, dismiss this Preface without congratulating men of letters on the establishment and increasing prosperity of the London Library, an institution founded for the purpose of accommodating subscribers with such books, at their own houses, as could only be consulted hitherto at the British Museum. The sole objection to the Museum is thus done away, and the literary world has a fair prospect of possessing two book-institutions instead of one, each with its distinct claims to regard, and presenting in combination all that the student can wish; for while it is highly desirable that authors should be able to have standard works at their command, when sickness or other circumstances render it impossible for them to go to the Museum, it is undoubtedly requisite that one great collection should exist in which they are sure to find the same works unremoved, in case of necessity,—not to mention curious volumes of all sorts, manuscripts, and a world of books of reference.

[Footnote 1: "It is probable that a prose translation would give a better idea of the genius and manner of this poet than any metrical one." Vol. i. p. 310.]

[Footnote 2: Discorsi sopra la Prinza Deca di Tito Livio, lib. iii. cap. i. At p. 230 of the present volume I have too hastily called St. Dominic the "founder of the Inquisition." It is generally conceded, I believe, by candid Protestant inquirers, that he was not; whatever zeal in the foundation and support of the tribunal may have been manifested by his order. But this does not acquit him of the cruelty for which he has been praised by Dante. He joined in the sanguinary persecution of the Albigenses.]

[Footnote: 3 It is entitled, "Italy, Austria, and the Pope;" and is full, not only of the eloquence of zeal, and of evidences of intellectual power, but of the most curious and instructive information.]

CONTENTS

OF

THE FIRST VOLUME.

* * * * *

DANTE.

CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS

THE ITALIAN PILGRIMS PROGRESS

I. The Journey through Hell II. Purgatory. III. Heaven

PULCI.

CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS

HUMOURS OF GIANTS

THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES

APPENDIX.

I. Story of Paulo and Francesca. Translation.

II. Accounts given by different writers of the circumstances relating to
Paulo and Francesca; concluding with the only facts ascertained.

III. Story of Ugolino. Translation. Real Story of Ugolino, and Chaucer's feeling respecting the Poem.

IV. Picture of Florence in the time of Dante's Ancestors. Translation.

V. The Monks and the Giants

VI. Passages in the Battle of Roncesvalles.

DANTE

Critical Notice

OF

DANTE'S LIFE AND GENIUS.[1]

Dante was a very great poet, a man of the strongest passions, a claimant of unbounded powers to lead and enlighten the world; and he lived in a semi-barbarous age, as favourable to the intensity of his imagination, as it was otherwise to the rest of his pretensions. Party zeal, and the fluctuations of moral and critical opinion, have at different periods over-rated and depreciated his memory; and if, in the following attempt to form its just estimate, I have found myself compelled, in some important respects, to differ with preceding writers, and to protest in particular against his being regarded as a proper teacher on any one point, poetry excepted, and as far as all such genius and energy cannot in some degree help being, I have not been the less sensible of the wonderful nature of that genius, while acting within the circle to which it belongs. Dante was indeed so great a poet, and at the same time exhibited in his personal character such a mortifying exception to what we conceive to be the natural wisdom and temper of great poets; in other words, he was such a bigoted and exasperated man, and sullied his imagination with so much that is contradictory to good feeling, in matters divine as well as human; that I should not have thought myself justified in assisting, however humbly, to extend the influence of his writings, had I not believed a time to have arrived, when the community may profit both from the marvels of his power and the melancholy absurdity of its contradictions.

Dante Alighieri, who has always been known by his Christian rather than surname (partly owing to the Italian predilection for Christian names, and partly to the unsettled state of patronymics in his time), was the son of a lawyer of good family in Florence, and was born in that city on the 14th of May 1265 (sixty-three years before the birth of Chaucer). The stock is said to have been of Roman origin, of the race of the Frangipani; but the only certain trace of it is to Cacciaguida, a Florentine cavalier of the house of the Elisei, who died in the Crusades. Dante gives an account of him in his Paradiso.[2] Cacciaguida married a lady of the Alighieri family of the Valdipado; and, giving the name to one of his children, they subsequently retained it as a patronymic in preference to their own. It would appear, from the same poem, not only that the Alighieri were the more important house, but that some blot had darkened the scutcheon of the Elisei; perhaps their having been poor, and transplanted (as he seems to imply) from some disreputable district. Perhaps they were known to have been of ignoble origin; for, in the course of one of his most philosophical treatises, he bursts into an extraordinary ebullition of ferocity against such as adduce a knowledge of that kind as an argument against a family's acquired nobility; affirming that such brutal stuff should be answered not with words, but with the dagger.[3]

The Elisei, however, must have been of some standing; for Macchiavelli, in his History of Florence, mentions them in his list of the early Guelph and Ghibelline parties, where the side which they take is different from that of the poet's immediate progenitors.[4] The arms of the Alighieri (probably occasioned by the change in that name, for it was previously written Aldighieri) are interesting on account of their poetical and aspiring character. They are a golden wing on a field azure.[5]

It is generally supposed that the name Dante is an abbreviation of Durante; but this is not certain, though the poet had a nephew so called. Dante is the name he goes by in the gravest records, in law-proceedings, in his epitaph, in the mention of him put by himself into the mouth of a blessed spirit. Boccaccio intimates that he was christened Dante, and derives the name from the ablative case of dans (giving)—a probable etymology, especially for a Christian appellation. As an abbreviation of Durante, it would correspond in familiarity with the Ben of Ben Jonson—a diminutive that would assuredly not have been used by grave people on occasions like those mentioned, though a wit of the day gave the masons a shilling to carve "O rare Ben Jonson!" on his grave stone. On the other hand, if given at the font, the name of Ben would have acquired all the legal gravity of Benjamin. In the English Navy List, not long ago, one of our gallant admirals used to figure as "Billy Douglas."

Of the mother of Dante nothing is known except that she was his father's second wife, and that her Christian name was Bella, or perhaps surname Bello. It might, however, be conjectured, from the remarkable and only opportunity which our author has taken of alluding to her, that he derived his disdainful character rather from his mother than father.[6] The father appears to have died during the boyhood of his illustrious son.

The future poet, before he had completed his ninth year, conceived a romantic attachment to a little lady who had just entered hers, and who has attained a celebrity of which she was destined to know nothing. This was the famous Beatrice Portinari, daughter of a rich Florentine who founded more than one charitable institution. She married another man, and died in her youth; but retained the Platonical homage of her young admirer, living and dead, and became the heroine of his great poem.

It is unpleasant to reduce any portion of a romance to the events of ordinary life; but with the exception of those who merely copy from one another, there has been such a conspiracy on the part of Dante's biographers to overlook at least one disenchanting conclusion to be drawn to that effect from the poet's own writings, that the probable truth of the matter must here for the first time be stated. The case, indeed, is clear enough from his account of it. The natural tendencies of a poetical temperament (oftener evinced in a like manner than the world in general suppose) not only made the boy-poet fall in love, but, in the truly Elysian state of the heart at that innocent and adoring time of life, made him fancy he had discovered a goddess in the object of his love; and strength of purpose as well as imagination made him grow up in the fancy. He disclosed himself, as time advanced, only by his manner—received complacent recognitions in company from the young lady—offended her by seeming to devote himself to another (see the poem in the Vita Nuova, beginning "Ballata io vo")—rendered himself the sport of her and her young friends by his adoring timidity (see the 5th and 6th sonnets in the same work)—in short, constituted her a paragon of perfection, and enabled her, by so doing, to shew that she was none. He says, that finding himself unexpectedly near her one day in company, he trembled so, and underwent such change of countenance, that many of the ladies present began to laugh with her about him—"si gabbavano di me." And he adds, in verse,

"Con l'altre donne mia vista gabbate,
E non pensate, donna, onde si mova
Ch'io vi rassembri sì figura nova,
Quando riguardo la vostra beltate," &c. Son. 5.

"You laugh with the other ladies to see how I look (literally, you mock my appearance); and do not think, lady, what it is that renders me so strange a figure at sight of your beauty."

And in the sonnet that follows, he accuses her of preventing pity of him in others, by such "killing mockery" as makes him wish for death ("la pietà, che 'l vostro gabbo recinde," &c.)[7]

Now, it is to be admitted, that a young lady, if she is not very wise, may laugh at her lover with her companions, and yet return his love, after her fashion; but the fair Portinari laughs and marries another. Some less melancholy face, some more intelligible courtship, triumphed over the questionable flattery of the poet's gratuitous worship; and the idol of Dante Alighieri became the wife of Messer Simone de' Bardi. Not a word does he say on that mortifying point. It transpired from a clause in her father's will. And yet so bent are the poet's biographers on leaving a romantic doubt in one's mind, whether Beatrice may not have returned his passion, that not only do all of them (as far as I have observed) agree in taking no notice of these sonnets, but the author of the treatise entitled Dante and the Catholic Philosophy of the Thirteenth Century, "in spite" (as a critic says) "of the Beatrice, his daughter, wife of Messer Simone de' Bardi, of the paternal will," describes her as dying in "all the lustre of virginity." [8] The assumption appears to be thus gloriously stated, as a counterpart to the notoriety of its untruth. It must be acknowledged, that Dante himself gave the cue to it by more than silence; for he not only vaunts her acquaintance in the next world, but assumes that she returns his love in that region, as if no such person as her husband could have existed, or as if he himself had not been married also. This life-long pertinacity of will is illustrative of his whole career.

Meantime, though the young poet's father had died, nothing was wanting on the part of his guardians, or perhaps his mother, to furnish him with an excellent education. It was so complete, as to enable him to become master of all the knowledge of his time; and he added to this learning more than a taste for drawing and music. He speaks of himself as drawing an angel in his tablets on the first anniversary of Beatrice's death.[9] One of his instructors was Brunetto Latini, the most famous scholar then living; and he studied both at the universities of Padua and Bologna. At eighteen, perhaps sooner, he had shown such a genius for poetry as to attract the friendship of Guido Cavalcante, a young noble of a philosophical as well as poetical turn of mind, who has retained a reputation with posterity: and it was probably at the same time he became acquainted with Giotto, who drew his likeness, and with Casella, the musician, whom he greets with so much tenderness in the other world.

Nor were his duties as a citizen forgotten. The year before Beatrice's death, he was at the battle of Campaldino, which his countrymen gained against the people of Arezzo; and the year after it he was present at the taking of Caprona from the Pisans. It has been supposed that he once studied medicine with a view to it as a profession; but the conjecture probably originated in nothing more than his having entered himself of one of the city-companies (which happened to be the medical) for the purpose of qualifying himself to accept office; a condition exacted of the gentry by the then democratic tendencies of the republic. It is asserted also, by an early commentator, that he entered the Franciscan order of friars, but quitted it before he was professed; and, indeed, the circumstance is not unlikely, considering his agitated and impatient turn of mind. Perhaps he fancied that he had done with the world when it lost the wife of Simone de' Bardi.

Weddings that might have taken place but do not, are like the reigns of deceased heirs-apparent; every thing is assumable in their favour, checked only by the histories of husbands and kings. Would the great but splenetic poet have made an angel and a saint of Beatrice, had he married her? He never utters the name of the woman whom he did marry.

Gemma Donati was a kinswoman of the powerful family of that name. It seems not improbable, from some passages in his works, that she was the young lady whom he speaks of as taking pity on him on account of his passion for Beatrice;[10] and in common justice to his feelings as a man and a gentleman, it is surely to be concluded, that he felt some sort of passion for his bride, if not of a very spiritual sort; though he afterwards did not scruple to intimate that he was ashamed of it, and Beatrice is made to rebuke him in the other world for thinking of any body after herself.[11] At any rate, he probably roused what was excitable in his wife's temper, with provocations from his own; for the nature of the latter is not to be doubted, whereas there is nothing but tradition to shew for the bitterness of hers. Foscolo is of opinion that the tradition itself arose simply from a rhetorical flourish of Boccaccio's, in his Life of Dante, against the marriages of men of letters; though Boccaccio himself expressly adds, that he knows nothing to the disadvantage of the poet's wife, except that her husband, after quitting Florence, would never either come where she was, or suffer her to come to him, mother as she was by him of so many children;—a statement, it must be confessed, not a little encouraging to the tradition.[12] Be this as it may, Dante married in his twenty-sixth year; wrote an adoring account of his first love (the Vita Nuova) in his twenty-eighth; and among the six children which Gemma brought him, had a daughter whom he named Beatrice, in honour, it is understood, of the fair Portinari; which surely was either a very great compliment, or no mean trial to the temper of the mother.

We shall see presently how their domestic intercourse was interrupted, and what absolute uncertainty there is respecting it, except as far as conclusions may be drawn from his own temper and history.

Italy, in those days, was divided into the parties of Guelphs and Ghibellines; the former, the advocates of general church-ascendancy and local government; the latter, of the pretensions of the Emperor of Germany, who claimed to be the Roman Cæsar, and paramount over the Pope. In Florence, the Guelphs had for a long time been so triumphant as to keep the Ghibellines in a state of banishment. Dante was born and bred a Guelph: he had twice borne arms for his country against Ghibelline neighbours; and now, at the age of thirty-five, in the ninth of his marriage, and last of his residence with his wife, he was appointed chief of the temporary administrators of affairs, called Priors;—functionaries who held office only for two months.

Unfortunately, at that moment, his party had become subdivided into the factions of the Whites and Blacks, or adherents of two different sides in a dispute that took place in Pistoia. The consequences becoming serious, the Blacks proposed to bring in, as mediator, the French Prince, Charles of Valois, then in arms for the Pope against the Emperor; but the Whites, of whom Dante was one, were hostile to the measure; and in order to prevent it, he and his brother magistrates expelled for a time the heads of both factions, to the satisfaction of neither. The Whites accused them of secretly leaning to the Ghibellines, and the Blacks of openly favouring the Whites; who being, indeed, allowed to come back before their time, on the alleged ground of the unwholesomeness of their place of exile, which was fatal to Dante's friend Cavalcante, gave a colour to the charge. Dante answered it by saying, that he had then quitted office; but he could not shew that he had lost his influence. Meantime, Charles was still urged to interfere, and Dante was sent ambassador to the Pope to obtain his disapprobation of the interference; but the Pope (Boniface the Eighth), who had probably discovered that the Whites had ceased to care for any thing but their own disputes, and who, at all events, did not like their objection to his representative, beguiled the ambassador and encouraged the French prince; the Blacks, in consequence, regained their ascendancy; and the luckless poet, during his absence, was denounced as a corrupt administrator of affairs, guilty of peculation; was severely mulcted; banished from Tuscany for two years; and subsequently, for contumaciousness, was sentenced to be burnt alive, in case he returned ever. He never did return.

From that day forth, Dante never beheld again his home or his wife. Her relations obtained possession of power, but no use was made of it except to keep him in exile. He had not accorded with them; and perhaps half the secret of his conjugal discomfort was owing to politics. It is the opinion of some, that the married couple were not sorry to part; others think that the wife remained behind, solely to scrape together what property she could, and bring up the children. All that is known is, that she never lived with him more.

Dante now certainly did what his enemies had accused him of wishing to do: he joined the old exiles whom he had helped to make such, the party of the Ghibellines. He alleges, that he never was really of any party but his own; a naïve confession, probably true in one sense, considering his scorn of other people, his great intellectual superiority, and the large views he had for the whole Italian people. And, indeed, he soon quarrelled in private with the individuals composing his new party, however stanch he apparently remained to their cause. His former associates he had learnt to hate for their differences with him and for their self-seeking; he hated the Pope for deceiving him; he hated the Pope's French allies for being his allies, and interfering with Florence; and he had come to love the Emperor for being hated by them all, and for holding out (as he fancied) the only chance of reuniting Italy to their confusion, and making her the restorer of himself, and the mistress of the world.

With these feelings in his heart, no money in his purse, and no place in which to lay his head, except such as chance-patrons afforded him, he now began to wander over Italy, like some lonely lion of a man, "grudging in his great disdain." At one moment he was conspiring and hoping; at another, despairing and endeavouring to conciliate his beautiful Florence: now again catching hope from some new movement of the Emperor's; and then, not very handsomely threatening and re-abusing her; but always pondering and grieving, or trying to appease his thoughts with some composition, chiefly of his great work. It is conjectured, that whenever anything particularly affected him, whether with joy or sorrow, he put it, hot with the impression, into his "sacred poem." Every body who jarred against his sense of right or his prejudices he sent to the infernal regions, friend or foe: the strangest people who sided with them (but certainly no personal foe) he exalted to heaven. He encouraged, if not personally assisted, two ineffectual attempts of the Ghibellines against Florence; wrote, besides his great work, a book of mixed prose and poetry on "Love and Virtue" (the Convito, or Banquet); a Latin treatise on Monarchy (de Monarchia), recommending the "divine right" of the Emperor; another in two parts, and in the same language, on the Vernacular Tongue (de Vulgari Eloquio); and learnt to know meanwhile, as he affectingly tells us, "how hard it was to climb other people's stairs, and how salt the taste of bread is that is not our own." It is even thought not improbable, from one awful passage of his poem, that he may have "placed himself in some public way," and, "stripping his visage of all shame, and trembling in his very vitals," have stretched out his hand "for charity" [13]—an image of suffering, which, proud as he was, yet considering how great a man, is almost enough to make one's common nature stoop down for pardon at his feet; and yet he should first prostrate himself at the feet of that nature for his outrages on God and man. Several of the princes and feudal chieftains of Italy entertained the poet for a while in their houses; but genius and worldly power, unless for worldly purposes, find it difficult to accord, especially in tempers like his. There must be great wisdom and amiableness on both sides to save them from jealousy of one another's pretensions. Dante was not the man to give and take in such matters on equal terms; and hence he is at one time in a palace, and at another in a solitude. Now he is in Sienna, now in Arezzo, now in Bologna; then probably in Verona with Can Grande's elder brother; then (if we are to believe those who have tracked his steps) in Casentino; then with the Marchese Moroello Malaspina in Lunigiana; then with the great Ghibelline chieftain Faggiuola in the mountains near Urbino; then in Romagna, in Padua, in Paris (arguing with the churchmen), some say in Germany, and at Oxford; then again in Italy; in Lucca (where he is supposed to have relapsed from his fidelity to Beatrice in favour of a certain "Gentucca"); then again in Verona with the new prince, the famous Can Grande (where his sarcasms appear to have lost him a doubtful hospitality); then in a monastery in the mountains of Umbria; in Udine; in Ravenna; and there at length he put up for the rest of his life with his last and best friend, Guido Novello da Polenta, not the father, but the nephew of the hapless Francesca.

It was probably in the middle period of his exile, that in one of the moments of his greatest longing for his native country, he wrote that affecting passage in the Convito, which was evidently a direct effort at conciliation. Excusing himself for some harshness and obscurity in the style of that work, he exclaims, "Ah! would it had pleased the Dispenser of all things that this excuse had never been needed; that neither others had done me wrong, nor myself undergone penalty undeservedly—the penalty, I say, of exile and of poverty. For it pleased the citizens of the fairest and most renowned daughter of Rome—Florence—to cast me out of her most sweet bosom, where I was born, and bred, and passed half of the life of man, and in which, with her good leave, I still desire with all my heart to repose my weary spirit, and finish the days allotted me; and so I have wandered in almost every place to which our language extends, a stranger, almost a beggar, exposing against my will the wounds given me by fortune, too often unjustly imputed to the sufferer's fault. Truly I have been a vessel without sail and without rudder, driven about upon different ports and shores by the dry wind that springs out of dolorous poverty; and hence have I appeared vile in the eyes of many, who, perhaps, by some better report had conceived of me a different impression, and in whose sight not only has my person become thus debased, but an unworthy opinion created of every thing which I did, or which I had to do." [14]

How simply and strongly written! How full of the touching yet undegrading commiseration which adversity has a right to take upon itself, when accompanied with the consciousness of manly endeavour and a good motive! How could such a man condescend at other times to rage with abuse, and to delight himself in images of infernal torment!

The dates of these fluctuations of feeling towards his native city are not known; but it is supposed to have been not very long before his abode with Can Grande that he received permission to return to Florence, on conditions which he justly refused and resented in the following noble letter to a kinsman. The old spelling of the original (in the note) is retained as given by Foscolo in the article on "Dante" in the Edinburgh Review (vol. XXX. no. 60); and I have retained also, with little difference, the translation which accompanies it:

"From your letter, which I received with due respect and affection, I observe how much you have at heart my restoration to my country. I am bound to you the more gratefully, inasmuch as an exile rarely finds a friend. But after mature consideration, I must, by my answer, disappoint the wishes of some little minds; and I confide in the judgment to which your impartiality and prudence will lead you. Your nephew and mine has written to me, what indeed had been mentioned by many other friends, that, by a decree concerning the exiles, I am allowed to return to Florence, provided I pay a certain sum of money, and submit to the humiliation of asking and receiving absolution: wherein, my father, I see two propositions that are ridiculous and impertinent. I speak of the impertinence of those who mention such conditions to me; for in your letter, dictated by judgment and discretion, there is no such thing. Is such an invitation, then, to return to his country glorious to d. all. (Dante Allighieri), after suffering in exile almost fifteen years? Is it thus they would recompense innocence which all the world knows, and the labour and fatigue of unremitting study? Far from the man who is familiar with philosophy be the senseless baseness of a heart of earth, that could act like a little sciolist, and imitate the infamy of some others, by offering himself up as it were in chains: far from the man who cries aloud for justice, this compromise by his money with his persecutors. No, my father, this is not the way that shall lead me back to my country. I will return with hasty steps, if you or any other can open to me a way that shall not derogate from the fame and honour of d. (Dante); but if by no such way Florence can be entered, then Florence I shall never enter. What! shall I not everywhere enjoy the light of the sun and stars? and may I not seek and contemplate, in every corner of the earth, under the canopy of heaven, consoling and delightful truth, without first rendering myself inglorious, nay infamous, to the people and republic of Florence? Bread, I hope, will not fail me." [15]

Had Dante's pride and indignation always vented themselves in this truly exalted manner, never could the admirers of his genius have refused him their sympathy; and never, I conceive, need he either have brought his exile upon him, or closed it as he did. To that close we have now come, and it is truly melancholy and mortifying. Failure in a negotiation with the Venetians for his patron, Guido Novello, is supposed to have been the last bitter drop which made the cup of his endurance run over. He returned from Venice to Ravenna, worn out, and there died, after fifteen years' absence from his country, in the year 1231, aged fifty-seven. His life had been so agitated, that it probably would not have lasted so long, but for the solace of his poetry, and the glory which he knew it must produce him. Guido gave him a sumptuous funeral, and intended to give him a monument; but such was the state of Italy in those times, that he himself died in exile the year after. The monument, however, and one of a noble sort, was subsequently bestowed by the father of Cardinal Bembo, in 1483; and another, still nobler, as late as 1780, by Cardinal Gonzaga. His countrymen, in after years, made two solemn applications for the removal of his dust to Florence; but the just pride of the Ravennese refused them.

Of the exile's family, three sons died young; the daughter went into a nunnery; and the two remaining brothers, who ultimately joined their father in his banishment, became respectable men of letters, and left families in Ravenna; where the race, though extinct in the male line, still survives through a daughter, in the noble house of Serego Alighieri. No direct descent of the other kind from poets of former times is, I believe, known to exist.

The manners and general appearance of Dante have been minutely recorded, and are in striking agreement with his character. Boccaccio and other novelists are the chief relaters; and their accounts will be received accordingly with the greater or less trust, as the reader considers them probable; but the author of the Decameron personally knew some of his friends and relations, and he intermingles his least favourable reports with expressions of undoubted reverence. The poet was of middle height, of slow and serious deportment, had a long dark visage, large piercing eyes, large jaws, an aquiline nose, a projecting under-lip, and thick curling hair—an aspect announcing determination and melancholy. There is a sketch of his countenance, in his younger days, from the immature but sweet pencil of Giotto; and it is a refreshment to look at it, though pride and discontent, I think, are discernible in its lineaments. It is idle, and no true compliment to his nature, to pretend, as his mere worshippers do, that his face owes all its subsequent gloom and exacerbation to external causes, and that he was in every respect the poor victim of events—the infant changed at nurse by the wicked. What came out of him, he must have had in him, at least in the germ; and so inconsistent was his nature altogether, or, at any rate, such an epitome of all the graver passions that are capable of co-existing, both sweet and bitter, thoughtful and outrageous, that one is sometimes tempted to think he must have had an angel for one parent, and—I shall leave his own toleration to say what—for the other.

To continue the account of his manners and inclinations: He dressed with a becoming gravity; was temperate in his diet; a great student; seldom spoke, unless spoken to, but always to the purpose; and almost all the anecdotes recorded of him, except by himself, are full of pride and sarcasm. He was so swarthy, that a woman, as he was going by a door in Verona, is said to have pointed him out to another, with a remark which made the saturnine poet smile—"That is the man who goes to hell whenever he pleases, and brings back news of the people there." On which her companion observed—"Very likely; don't you see what a curly beard he has, and what a dark face? owing, I dare say, to the heat and smoke." He was evidently a passionate lover of painting and music—is thought to have been less strict in his conduct with regard to the sex than might be supposed from his platonical aspirations—(Boccaccio says, that even a goitre did not repel him from the pretty face of a mountaineer)—could be very social when he was young, as may be gathered from the sonnet addressed to his friend Cavalcante about a party for a boat—and though his poetry was so intense and weighty, the laudable minuteness of a biographer has informed us, that his hand-writing, besides being neat and precise, was of a long and particularly thin character: "meagre" is his word.

There is a letter, said to be nearly coeval with his time, and to be written by the prior of a monastery to a celebrated Ghibelline leader, a friend of Dante's, which, though hitherto accounted apocryphal by most, has such an air of truth, and contains an image of the poet in his exile so exceedingly like what we conceive of the man, that it is difficult not to believe it genuine, especially as the handwriting has lately been discovered to be that of Boccaccio.[16] At all events, I am sure the reader will not be sorry to have the substance of it. The writer says, that he perceived one day a man coming into the monastery, whom none of its inmates knew. He asked him what he wanted; but the stranger saying nothing, and continuing to gaze on the building as though contemplating its architecture, the question was put a second time; upon which, looking round on his interrogators, he answered, "Peace!" The prior, whose curiosity was strongly excited, took the stranger apart, and discovering who he was, shewed him all the attention becoming his fame; and then Dante took a little book out of his bosom, aid observing that perhaps the prior had not seen it, expressed a wish to leave it with his new friend as a memorial. It was "a portion," he said, "of his work." The prior received the volume with respect; and politely opening it at once, and fixing his eyes on the contents, in order, it would seem, to shew the interest he took in it, appeared suddenly to check some observation which they suggested. Dante found that his reader was surprised at seeing the work written in the vulgar tongue instead of Latin. He explained, that he wished to address himself to readers of all classes; and concluded with requesting the prior to add some notes, with the spirit of which he furnished him, and then forward it (transcribed, I presume, by the monks) to their common friend, the Ghibelline chieftain—a commission, which, knowing the prior's intimacy with that personage, appears to have been the main object of his coming to the place[17].

This letter has been adduced as an evidence of Dante's poem having transpired during his lifetime: a thing which, in the teeth of Boccaccio's statement to that effect, and indeed the poet's own testimony[18], Foscolo holds to be so impossible, that he turns the evidence against the letter. He thinks, that if such bitter invectives had been circulated, a hundred daggers would have been sheathed in the bosom of the exasperating poet[19]. But I cannot help being of opinion, with some writer whom I am unable at present to call to mind (Schlegel, I think), that the strong critical reaction of modern times in favour of Dante's genius has tended to exaggerate the idea conceived of him in relation to his own. That he was of importance, and bitterly hated in his native city, was a distinction he shared with other partisans who have obtained no celebrity, though his poetry, no doubt, must have increased the bitterness; that his genius also became more and more felt out of the city, by the few individuals capable of estimating a man of letters in those semi-barbarous times, may be regarded as certain; but that busy politicians in general, war-making statesmen, and princes constantly occupied in fighting for their existence with one another, were at all alive either to his merits or his invectives, or would have regarded him as anything but a poor wandering scholar, solacing his foolish interference in the politics of this world with the old clerical threats against his enemies in another, will hardly, I think, be doubted by any one who reflects on the difference between a fame accumulated by ages, and the living poverty that is obliged to seek its bread. A writer on a monkish subject may have acquired fame with monks, and even with a few distinguished persons, and yet have been little known, and less cared for, out of the pale of that very private literary public, which was almost exclusively their own. When we read, now-a-days, of the great poet's being so politely received by Can Grande, lord of Verona, and sitting at his princely table, we are apt to fancy that nothing but his great poetry procured him the reception, and that nobody present competed with him in the eyes of his host. But, to say nothing of the different kinds of retainers that could sit at a prince's table in those days, Can, who was more ostentatious than delicate in his munificence, kept a sort of caravansera for clever exiles, whom he distributed into lodgings classified according to their pursuits;[20] and Dante only shared his bounty with the rest, till the more delicate poet could no longer endure either the buffoonery of his companions, or the amusement derived from it by the master. On one occasion, his platter is slily heaped with their bones, which provokes him to call them dogs, as having none to shew for their own. Another time, Can Grande asks him how it is that his companions give more pleasure at court than himself; to which he answers, "Because like loves like." He then leaves the court, and his disgusted superiority is no doubt regarded as a pedantic assumption.

He stopped long nowhere, except with Guido Novello; and when that prince, whose downfal was at hand, sent him on the journey above mentioned to Venice, the senate (whom the poet had never offended) were so little aware of his being of consequence, that they declined giving him an audience. He went back, and broke his heart. Boccaccio says, that he would get into such passions with the very boys and girls in the street, who plagued him with party-words, as to throw stones at them—a thing that would be incredible, if persons acquainted with his great but ultra-sensitive nation did not know what Italians could do in all ages, from Dante's own age down to the times of Alfieri and Foscolo. It would be as difficult, from the evidence of his own works and of the exasperation he created, to doubt the extremest reports of his irascible temper, as it would be not to give implicit faith to his honesty. The charge of peculation which his enemies brought against this great poet, the world has universally scouted with an indignation that does it honour. He himself seems never to have condescended to allude to it; and a biographer would feel bound to copy his silence, had not the accusation been so atrociously recorded. But, on the other hand, who can believe that a man so capable of doing his fellow-citizens good and honour, would have experienced such excessive enmity, had he not carried to excess the provocations of his pride and scorn? His whole history goes to prove it, not omitting the confession he makes of pride as his chief sin, and the eulogies he bestows on the favourite vice of the age—revenge. His Christianity (at least as shewn in his poem) was not that of Christ, but of a furious polemic. His motives for changing his party, though probably of a mixed nature, like those of most human beings, may reasonably be supposed to have originated in something better than interest or indignation. He had most likely not agreed thoroughly with any party, and had become hopeless of seeing dispute brought to an end, except by the representative of the Cæsars. The inconsistency of the personal characters of the popes with the sacred claims of the chair of St. Peter, was also calculated greatly to disgust him; but still his own infirmities of pride and vindictiveness spoiled all; and when he loaded every body else with reproach for the misfortunes of his country, he should have recollected that, had his own faults been kept in subjection to his understanding, he might possibly have been its saviour. Dante's modesty has been asserted on the ground of his humbling himself to the fame of Virgil, and at the feet of blessed spirits; but this kind of exalted humility does not repay a man's fellow-citizens for lording it over them with scorn and derision. We learn from Boccaccio, that when he was asked to go ambassador from his party to the pope, he put to them the following useless and mortifying queries—"If I go, who is to stay?—and if I stay, who is to go?" [21] Neither did his pride make him tolerant of pride in others. A neighbour applying for his intercession with a magistrate, who had summoned him for some offence, Dante, who disliked the man for riding in an overbearing manner along the streets (stretching out his legs as wide as he could, and hindering people from going by), did intercede with the magistrate, but it was in behalf of doubling the fine in consideration of the horsemanship. The neighbour, who was a man of family, was so exasperated, that Sacchetti the novelist says it was the principal cause of Dante's expatriation. This will be considered the less improbable, if, as some suppose, the delinquent obtained possession of his derider's confiscated property; but, at all events, nothing is more likely to have injured him. The bitterest animosities are generally of a personal nature; and bitter indeed must have been those which condemned a man of official dignity and of genius to such a penalty as the stake.[22]

That the Florentines of old, like other half-Christianised people, were capable of any extremity against an opponent, burning included, was proved by the fates of Savonarola and others; and that Dante himself could admire the burners is evident from his eulogies and beatification of such men as Folco and St. Dominic. The tragical as well as "fantastic tricks" which

"Man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,"

plays with his energy and bad passions under the guise of duty, is among the most perplexing of those spectacles, which, according to a greater understanding than Dante's, "make the angels weep." (Dante, by the way, has introduced in his heaven no such angels as those; though he has plenty that scorn and denounce.) Lope de Vega, though a poet, was an officer of the Inquisition, and joined the famous Armada that was coming to thumb-screw and roast us into his views of Christian meekness. Whether the author of the story of Paulo and Francesca could have carried the Dominican theories into practice, had he been the banisher instead of the banished, is a point that may happily be doubted; but at all events he revenged himself on his enemies after their own fashion; for he answered their decree of the stake by putting them into hell.

Dante entitled the saddest poem in the world a Comedy, because it was written in a middle style; though some, by a strange confusion of ideas, think the reason must have been because it "ended happily!" that is, because, beginning with hell (to some), it terminated with "heaven" (to others). As well might they have said, that a morning's work in the Inquisition ended happily, because, while people were being racked in the dungeons, the officers were making merry in the drawing-room. For the much-injured epithet of "Divine," Dante's memory is not responsible. He entitled his poem, arrogantly enough, yet still not with that impiety of arrogance, "The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by nation but not by habits." The word "divine" was added by some transcriber; and it heaped absurdity on absurdity, too much of it, alas! being literally infernal tragedy. I am not speaking in mockery, any further than the fact itself cannot help so speaking. I respect what is to be respected in Dante; I admire in him what is admirable; would love (if his infernalities would let me) what is loveable; but this must not hinder one of the human race from protesting against what is erroneous in his fame, when it jars against every best feeling, human and divine. Mr. Cary thinks that Dante had as much right to avail himself of "the popular creed in all its extravagance" as Homer had of his gods, or Shakspeare of his fairies. But the distinction is obvious. Homer did not personally identify himself with a creed, or do his utmost to perpetuate the worst parts of it in behalf of a ferocious inquisitorial church, and to the risk of endangering the peace of millions of gentle minds.

The great poem thus misnomered is partly a system of theology, partly an abstract of the knowledge of the day, but chiefly a series of passionate and imaginative pictures, altogether forming an account of the author's times, his friends, his enemies, and himself, written to vent the spleen of his exile, and the rest of his feelings, good and bad, and to reform church and state by a spirit of resentment and obloquy, which highly needed reform itself. It has also a design strictly self-referential. The author feigns, that the beatified spirit of his mistress has obtained leave to warn and purify his soul by shewing him the state of things in the next world. She deputes the soul of his master Virgil to conduct him through hell and purgatory, and then takes him herself through the spheres of heaven, where Saint Peter catechises and confirms him, and where he is finally honoured with sights of the Virgin Mary, of Christ, and even a glimpse of the Supreme Being!

His hell, considered as a place, is, to speak geologically, a most fantastical formation. It descends from beneath Jerusalem to the centre of the earth, and is a funnel graduated in circles, each circle being a separate place of torment for a different vice or its co-ordinates, and the point of the funnel terminating with Satan stuck into ice. Purgatory is a corresponding mountain on the other side of the globe, commencing with the antipodes of Jerusalem, and divided into exterior circles of expiation, which end in a table-land forming the terrestrial paradise. From this the hero and his mistress ascend by a flight, exquisitely conceived, to the stars; where the sun and the planets of the Ptolemaic system (for the true one was unknown in Dante's time) form a series of heavens for different virtues, the whole terminating in the empyrean, or region of pure light, and the presence of the Beatific Vision.

The boundaries of old and new, strange as it may now seem to us, were so confused in those days, and books were so rare, and the Latin poets held in such invincible reverence, that Dante, in one and the same poem, speaks of the false gods of Paganism, and yet retains much of its lower mythology; nay, invokes Apollo himself at the door of paradise. There was, perhaps, some mystical and even philosophical inclusion of the past in this medley, as recognising the constant superintendence of Providence; but that Dante partook of what may be called the literary superstition of the time, even for want of better knowledge, is clear from the grave historical use he makes of poetic fables in his treatise on Monarchy, and in the very arguments which he puts into the mouths of saints and apostles. There are lingering feelings to this effect even now among the peasantry of Italy; where, the reader need not be told, Pagan customs of all sorts, including religious and most reverend ones, are existing under the sanction of other names;—heathenisms christened. A Tuscan postilion, once enumerating to me some of the native poets, concluded his list with Apollo; and a plaster-cast man over here, in London, appeared much puzzled, when conversing on the subject with a friend of mine, how to discrepate Samson from Hercules.

Dante accordingly, while, with the frightful bigotry of the schools, he puts the whole Pagan world into hell-borders (with the exception of two or three, whose salvation adds to the absurdity), mingles the hell of Virgil with that of Tertullian and St. Dominic; sets Minos at the door as judge; retains Charon in his old office of boatman over the Stygian lake; puts fabulous people with real among the damned, Dido, and Cacus, and Ephialtes, with Ezzelino and Pope Nicholas the Fifth; and associates the Centaurs and the Furies with the agents of diabolical torture. It has pleased him also to elevate Cato of Utica to the office of warder of purgatory, though the censor's poor good wife, Marcia, is detained in the regions below. By these and other far greater inconsistencies, the whole place of punishment becomes a reductio ad absurdum, as ridiculous as it is melancholy; so that one is astonished how so great a man, and especially a man who thought himself so far advanced beyond his age, and who possessed such powers of discerning the good and beautiful, could endure to let his mind live in so foul and foolish a region for any length of time, and there wreak and harden the unworthiest of his passions. Genius, nevertheless, is so commensurate with absurdity throughout the book, and there are even such sweet and balmy as well as sublime pictures in it occasionally, nay often, that not only will the poem ever be worthy of admiration, but when those increasing purifications of Christianity which our blessed reformers began, shall finally precipitate the whole dregs of the author into the mythology to which they belong, the world will derive a pleasure from it to an amount not to be conceived till the arrival of that day. Dante, meantime, with an impartiality which has been admired by those who can approve the assumption of a theological tyranny at the expense of common feeling and decency, has put friends as well as foes into hell: tutors of his childhood, kinsmen of those who treated him hospitably, even the father of his beloved friend, Guido Cavalcante—the last for not believing in a God: therein doing the worst thing possible in behalf of the belief, and totally differing both with the pious heathen Plutarch, and the great Christian philosopher Bacon, who were of opinion that a contumelious belief is worse than none, and that it is far better and more pious to believe in "no God at all," than in a God who would "eat his children as soon as they were born." And Dante makes him do worse; for the whole unbaptised infant world, Christian as well as Pagan, is in his Tartarus.

Milton has spoken of the "milder shades of Purgatory;" and truly they possess great beauties. Even in a theological point of view they are something like a bit of Christian refreshment after the horrors of the Inferno. The first emerging from the hideous gulf to the sight of the blue serenity of heaven, is painted in a manner inexpressibly charming. So is the sea-shore with the coming of the angel; the valley, with the angels in green; the repose at night on the rocks; and twenty other pictures of gentleness and love. And yet, special and great has been the escape of the Protestant world from this part of Roman Catholic belief; for Purgatory is the heaviest stone that hangs about the neck of the old and feeble in that communion. Hell is avoidable by repentance; but Purgatory, what modest conscience shall escape? Mr. Cary, in a note on a passage in which Dante recommends his readers to think on what follows this expiatory state, rather than what is suffered there,[23] looks upon the poet's injunction as an "unanswerable objection to the doctrine of purgatory," it being difficult to conceive "how the best can meet death without horror, if they believe it must be followed by immediate and intense suffering." Luckily, assent is not belief; and mankind's feelings are for the most part superior to their opinions; otherwise the world would have been in a bad way indeed, and nature not been vindicated of her children. But let us watch and be on our guard against all resuscitations of superstition.

As to our Florentine's Heaven, it is full of beauties also, though sometimes of a more questionable and pantomimical sort than is to be found in either of the other books. I shall speak of some of them presently; but the general impression of the place is, that it is no heaven at all. He says it is, and talks much of its smiles and its beatitude; but always excepting the poetry—especially the similes brought from the more heavenly earth—we realise little but a fantastical assemblage of doctors and doubtful characters, far more angry and theological than celestial; giddy raptures of monks and inquisitors dancing in circles, and saints denouncing popes and Florentines; in short, a heaven libelling itself with invectives against earth, and terminating in a great presumption. Many of the people put there, a Calvinistic Dante would have consigned to the "other place;" and some, if now living, would not be admitted into decent society. At the beginning of one of the cantos, the poet congratulates himself, with a complacent superiority, on his being in heaven and occupied with celestial matters, while his poor fellow-creatures are wandering and blundering on earth. But he had never got there! A divine—worthy of that name—of the Church of England (Dr. Whichcote), has beautifully said, that "heaven is first a temper, and then a place." According to this truly celestial topography, the implacable Florentine had not reached its outermost court. Again, his heavenly mistress, Beatrice, besides being far too didactic to sustain the womanly part of her character properly, alternates her smiles and her sarcasms in a way that jars horribly against the occasional enchantment of her aspect. She does not scruple to burst into taunts of the Florentines in the presence of Jesus himself; and the spirit of his ancestor, Cacciaguida, in the very bosom of Christian bliss, promises him revenge on his enemies! Is this the kind of zeal that is to be exempt from objection in a man who objected to all the world? or will it be thought a profaneness against such profanity, to remind the reader of the philosopher in Swift, who "while gazing on the stars, was betrayed by his lower parts into a ditch!"

The reader's time need not be wasted with the allegorical and other mystical significations given to the poem; still less on the question whether Beatrice is theology, or a young lady, or both; and least of all on the discovery of the ingenious Signor Rossetti, that Dante and all the other great old Italian writers meant nothing, either by their mistresses or their mythology, but attacks on the court of Rome. Suffice it, that besides all other possible meanings, Dante himself has told us that his poem has its obvious and literal meaning; that he means a spade by a spade, purgatory by purgatory, and truly and unaffectedly to devote his friends to the infernal regions whenever he does so. I confess I think it is a great pity that Guido Cavalcante did not live to read the poem, especially the passage about his father. The understanding of Guido, who had not the admiration for Virgil that Dante had (very likely for reasons that have been thought sound in modern times), was in all probability as good as that of his friend in many respects, and perhaps more so in one or two; and modern criticism might have been saved some of its pains of objection by the poet's contemporary.

The author did not live to publish, in any formal manner, his extraordinary poem, probably did not intend to do so, except under those circumstances of political triumph which he was always looking for; but as he shewed portions of it to his friends, it was no doubt talked of to a certain extent, and must have exasperated such of his enemies as considered him worth their hostility. No wonder they did all they could to keep him out of Florence. What would they have said of him, could they have written a counter poem? What would even his friends have said of him? for we see in what manner he has treated even those; and yet how could he possibly know, with respect either to friends or enemies, what passed between them and their consciences? or who was it that gave him his right to generate the boasted distinction between an author's feelings as a man and his assumed office as a theologian, and parade the latter at the former's expense? His own spleen, hatred, and avowed sentiments of vengeance, are manifest throughout the poem; and there is this, indeed, to be said for the moral and religious inconsistencies both of the man and his verse, that in those violent times the spirit of Christian charity, and even the sentiment of personal shame, were so little understood, that the author in one part of it is made to blush by a friend for not having avenged him; and it is said to have been thought a compliment to put a lady herself into hell, that she might be talked of, provided it was for something not odious. An admirer of this infernal kind of celebrity, even in later times, declared that he would have given a sum of money (I forget to what amount) if Dante had but done as much for one of his ancestors. It has been argued, that in all the parties concerned in these curious ethics there is a generous love of distinction, and a strong craving after life, action, and sympathy of some kind or other. Granted; there are all sorts of half-good, half-barbarous feelings in Dante's poem. Let justice be done to the good half; but do not let us take the ferocity for wisdom and piety; or pretend, in the complacency of our own freedom from superstition, to see no danger of harm to the less fortunate among our fellow-creatures in the support it receives from a man of genius. Bedlams have been filled with such horrors; thousands, nay millions of feeble minds are suffering by them or from them, at this minute, all over the world. Dante's best critic, Foscolo, has said much of the heroical nature of the age in which the poet lived; but he adds, that its mixture of knowledge and absurdity is almost inexplicable. The truth is, that like everything else which appears harsh and unaccountable in nature, it was an excess of the materials for good, working in an over-active and inexperienced manner; but knowing this, we are bound, for the sake of the good, not to retard its improvement by ignoring existing impieties, or blind ourselves to the perpetuating tendencies of the bigotries of great men. Oh! had the first indoctrinators of Christian feeling, while enlisting the "divine Plato" into the service of diviner charity, only kept the latter just enough in mind to discern the beautiful difference between the philosopher's unmalignant and improvable evil, and their own malignant and eternal one, what a world of folly and misery they might have saved us! But as the evil has happened, let us hope that even this form of it has had its uses. If Dante thought it salutary to the world to maintain a system of religious terror, the same charity which can hope that it may once have been so, has taught us how to commence a better. But did he, after all, or did he not, think it salutary? Did he think so, believing the creed himself? or did he think it from an unwilling sense of its necessity? Or, lastly, did he write only as a mythologist, and care for nothing but the exercise of his spleen and genius? If he had no other object than that, his conscientiousness would be reduced to a low pitch indeed. Foscolo is of opinion he was not only in earnest, but that he was very near taking himself for an apostle, and would have done so had his prophecies succeeded, perhaps with success to the pretension.[24] Thank heaven, his "Hell" has not embittered the mild reading-desks of the Church of England.

If King George the Third himself, with all his arbitrary notions, and willing religious acquiescence, could not endure the creed of St. Athanasius with its damnatory enjoinments of the impossible, what would have been said to the inscription over Dante's hell-gate, or the account of Ugolino eating an archbishop, in the gentle chapels of Queen Victoria? May those chapels have every beauty in them, and every air of heaven, that painting and music can bestow—divine gifts, not unworthy to be set before their Divine Bestower; but far from them be kept the foul fiends of inhumanity and superstition!

It is certainly impossible to get at a thorough knowledge of the opinions of Dante even in theology; and his morals, if judged according to the received standard, are not seldom puzzling. He rarely thinks as the popes do; sometimes not as the Church does: he is lax, for instance, on the subject of absolution by the priest at death.[25] All you can be sure of is, the predominance of his will, the most wonderful poetry, and the notions he entertained of the degrees of vice and virtue. Towards the errors of love he is inclined to be so lenient (some think because he had indulged in them himself), that it is pretty clear he would not have put Paulo and Francesca into hell, if their story had not been too recent, and their death too sudden, to allow him to assume their repentance in the teeth of the evidence required. He avails himself of orthodox license to put "the harlot Rahab" into heaven ("cette bonne fille de Jericho," as Ginguéné calls her); nay, he puts her into the planet Venus, as if to compliment her on her profession; and one of her companions there is a fair Ghibelline, sister of the tyrant Ezzelino, a lady famous for her gallantries, of whom the poet good-naturedly says, that she "was overcome by her star"—to wit, the said planet Venus; and yet he makes her the organ of the most unfeminine triumphs over the Guelphs. But both these ladies, it is to be understood, repented—for they had time for repentance; their good fortune saved them. Poor murdered Francesca had no time to repent; therefore her mischance was her damnation! Such are the compliments theology pays to the Creator. In fact, nothing is really punished in Dante's Catholic hell but impenitence, deliberate or accidental. No delay of repentance, however dangerous, hinders the most hard-hearted villain from reaching his heaven. The best man goes to hell for ever, if he does not think he has sinned as Dante thinks; the worst is beatified, if he agrees with him: the only thing which every body is sure of, is some dreadful duration of agony in purgatory—the great horror of Catholic death beds. Protestantism may well hug itself on having escaped it. O Luther! vast was the good you did us. O gentle Church of England! let nothing persuade you that it is better to preach frightful and foolish ideas of God from your pulpits, than loving-kindness to all men, and peace above all things.

If Dante had erred only on the side of indulgence, humanity could easily have forgiven him—for the excesses of charity are the extensions of hope; but, unfortunately, where he is sweet-natured once, he is bitter a hundred times. This is the impression he makes on universalists of all creeds and parties; that is to say, on men who having run the whole round of sympathy with their fellow-creatures, become the only final judges of sovereign pretension. It is very well for individuals to make a god of Dante for some encouragement of their own position or pretension; but a god for the world at large he never was, or can be; and I doubt if an impression to this effect was not always, from the very dawn of our literature, the one entertained of him by the genius of our native country, which could never long endure any kind of unwarrantable dictation. Chaucer evidently thought him a man who would spare no unnecessary probe to the feelings (see the close of his version of Ugolino). Spenser says not a word of him, though he copied Tasso, and eulogised Ariosto. Shakspeare would assuredly have put him into the list of those presumptuous lookers into eternity who "take upon themselves to know" (Cymbeline, act v. sc. 4). Milton, in his sonnet to Henry Lawes, calls him "that sad Florentine"—a lamenting epithet, by which we do not designate a man whom we desire to resemble. The historian of English poetry, admirably applying to him a passage out of Milton, says that "Hell grows darker at his frown." [26]

Walter Scott could not read him, at least not with pleasure. He tells Miss Seward that the "plan" of the poem appeared to him "unhappy; the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting." [27] Uninteresting, I think, it is impossible to consider it. The known world is there, and the unknown pretends to be there; and both are surely interesting to most people.

Landor, in his delightful book the Pentameron—a book full of the profoundest as well as sweetest humanity—makes Petrarch follow up Boccaccio's eulogies of the episode of Paulo and Francesca with ebullitions of surprise and horror:

"Petrarca. Perfection of poetry! The greater is my wonder at discovering nothing else of the same order or cast in this whole section of the poem. He who fainted at the recital of Francesca,

'And he who fell as a dead body falls'

would exterminate all the inhabitants of every town in Italy! What execrations against Florence, Pistoia, Pisa, Siena, Genoa! what hatred against the whole human race! what exultation and merriment at eternal and immitigable sufferings! Seeing this, I cannot but consider the Inferno as the most immoral and impious book that ever was written. Yet, hopeless that our country shall ever see again such poetry, and certain that without it our future poets would be more feebly urged forward to excellence, I would have dissuaded Dante from cancelling it, if this had been his intention." [28]

Most happily is the distinction here intimated between the undesirableness of Dante's book in a moral and religious point of view, and the greater desirableness of it, nevertheless, as a pattern of poetry; for absurdity, however potent, wears itself out in the end, and leaves what is good and beautiful to vindicate even so foul an origin.

Again, Petrarch says, "What an object of sadness and of consternation, he who rises up from hell like a giant refreshed!

"Boccaccio. Strange perversion! A pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night, to guide no one. Paradise had fewer wants for him to satisfy than hell had, all which he fed to repletion; but let us rather look to his poetry than his temper."

See also what is said in that admirable book further on (p. 50), respecting the most impious and absurd passage in all Dante's poem, the assumption about Divine Love in the inscription over hell-gate—one of those monstrosities of conception which none ever had the effrontery to pretend to vindicate, except theologians who profess to be superior to the priests of Moloch, and who yet defy every feeling of decency and humanity for the purpose of explaining their own worldly, frightened, or hard-hearted submission to the mistakes of the most wretched understandings. Ugo Foscolo, an excellent critic where his own temper and violence did not interfere, sees nothing but jealousy in Petrarch's dislike of Dante, and nothing but Jesuitism in similar feelings entertained by such men as Tiraboschi. But all gentle and considerate hearts must dislike the rage and bigotry in Dante, even were it true (as the Dantesque Foscolo thinks) that Italy will never be regenerated till one-half of it is baptised in the blood of the other![29] Such men, with all their acuteness, are incapable of seeing what can be effected by nobler and serener times, and the progress of civilisation. They fancy, no doubt, that they are vindicating the energies of Nature herself, and the inevitable necessity of "doing evil that good may come." But Dante in so doing violated the Scripture he professed to revere; and men must not assume to themselves that final knowledge of results, which is the only warrant of the privilege, and the possession of which is to be arrogated by no earthly wisdom. One calm discovery of science may do away with all the boasted eternal necessities of the angry and the self-idolatrous. The passions that may be necessary to savages are not bound to remain so to civilised men, any more than the eating of man's flesh or the worship of Jugghernaut. When we think of the wonderful things lately done by science for the intercourse of the world, and the beautiful and tranquil books of philosophy written by men of equal energy and benevolence, and opening the peacefulest hopes for mankind, and views of creation to which Dante's universe was a nutshell,—such a vision as that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no better than the dream of an hypochondriacal savage, and his nutshell a rottenness to be spit out of the mouth.

Heaven send that the great poet's want of charity has not made myself presumptuous and uncharitable! But it is in the name of society I speak; and words, at all events, now-a-days are not the terrible, stake-preceding things they were in his. Readers in general, however—even those of the literary world—have little conception of the extent to which Dante carries either his cruelty or his abuse. The former (of which I shall give some examples presently) shews appalling habits of personal resentment; the latter is outrageous to a pitch of the ludicrous—positively screaming. I will give some specimens of it out of Foscolo himself, who collects them for a different purpose; though, with all his idolatry of Dante, he was far from being insensible to his mistakes.

"The people of Sienna," according to this national and Christian poet, were "a parcel of cox-combs; those of Arezzo, dogs; and of Casentino, hogs. Lucca made a trade of perjury. Pistoia was a den of beasts, and ought to be reduced to ashes; and the river Arno should overflow and drown every soul in Pisa. Almost all the women in Florence walked half-naked in public, and were abandoned in private. Every brother, husband, son, and father, in Bologna, set their women to sale. In all Lombardy were not to be found three men who were not rascals; and in Genoa and Romagna people went about pretending to be men, but in reality were bodies inhabited by devils, their souls having gone to the 'lowest pit of hell' to join the betrayers of their friends and kinsmen." [30]

So much for his beloved countrymen. As for foreigners, particularly kings, "Edward the First of England, and Robert of Scotland, were a couple of grasping fools; the Emperor Albert was an usurper; Alphonso the Second, of Spain, a debauchee; the King of Bohemia a coward; Frederick of Arragon a coward and miser; the Kings of Portugal and Norway forgers; the King of Naples a man whose virtues were expressed by a unit, and his vices by a million; and the King of France, the descendant of a Paris butcher, and of progenitors who poisoned St. Thomas Aquinas, their descendants conquering with the arms of Judas rather than of soldiers, and selling the flesh of their daughters to old men, in order to extricate themselves from a danger." [31]

When we add to these invectives, damnations of friends as well as foes, of companions, lawyers, men of letters, princes, philosophers, popes, pagans, innocent people as well as guilty, fools and wise, capable and incapable, men, women, and children,—it is really no better than a kind of diabolical sublimation of Lord Thurlow's anathemas in the Rolliad, which begins with

"Damnation seize ye all;"

and ends with

"Damn them beyond what mortal tongue can tell,
Confound, sink, plunge them all to deepest blackest hell." [32]

In the gross, indeed, this is ridiculous enough.

No burlesque can beat it. But in the particular, one is astonished and saddened at the cruelties in which the poet allows his imagination to riot horrors generally described with too intense a verisimilitude not to excite our admiration, with too astounding a perseverance not to amaze our humanity, and sometimes with an amount of positive joy and delight that makes us ready to shut the book with disgust and indignation. Thus, in a circle in hell, where traitors are stuck up to their chins in ice (canto xxxii.), the visitor, in walking about, happens to give one of their faces a kick; the sufferer weeps, and then curses him—with such infernal truth does the writer combine the malignant with the pathetic! Dante replies to the curse by asking the man his name. He is refused it. He then seizes the miserable wretch by the hair, in order to force him to the disclosure; and Virgil is represented as commending the barbarity![33] But he does worse. To barbarity he adds treachery of his own. He tells another poor wretch, whose face is iced up with his tears, as if he had worn a crystal vizor, that if he will disclose his name and offence, he will relieve his eyes awhile, that he may weep. The man does so; and the ferocious poet then refuses to perform his promise, adding mockery to falsehood, and observing that ill manners are the only courtesy proper to wards such a fellow![34] It has been conjectured, that Macchiavelli apparently encouraged the enormities of the princes of his time, with a design to expose them to indignation. It might have been thought of Dante, if he had not taken a part in the cruelty, that he detailed the horrors of his hell out of a wish to disgust the world with its frightful notions of God. This is certainly the effect of the worst part of his descriptions in an age like the present. Black burning gulfs, full of outcries and blasphemy, feet red-hot with fire, men eternally eating their fellow-creatures, frozen wretches malignantly dashing their iced heads against one another, other adversaries mutually exchanging shapes by force of an attraction at once irresistible and loathing, and spitting with hate and disgust when it is done—Enough, enough, for God's sake! Take the disgust out of one's senses, O flower of true Christian wisdom and charity, now beginning to fill the air with fragrance!

But it will be said that Dante did all this out of his hate of cruelty itself, and of treachery itself. Partly no doubt he did; and entirely he thought he did. But see how the notions of such retribution react upon the judge, and produce in him the bad passions he punishes. It is true the punishments are imaginary. Were a human being actually to see such things, he must be dehumanised or he would cry out against them with horror and detestation. But the poem draws them as truths; the writer's creed threatened them; he himself contributed to maintain the belief; and however we may suppose such a belief to have had its use in giving alarm to ruffian passions and barbarously ignorant times, an age arrives when a beneficent Providence permits itself to be better understood, and dissipates the superfluous horror.

Many, indeed, of the absurdities of Dante's poem are too obvious now-a-days to need remark. Even the composition of the poem, egotistically said to be faultless by such critics as Alfieri, who thought they resembled him, partakes, as every body's style does, of the faults as well as good qualities of the man. It is nervous, concise, full almost as it can hold, picturesque, mighty, primeval; but it is often obscure, often harsh, and forced in its constructions, defective in melody, and wilful and superfluous in the rhyme. Sometimes, also, the writer is inconsistent in circumstance (probably from not having corrected the poem); and he is not above being filthy. Even in the episode of Paulo and Francesca, which has so often been pronounced faultless, and which is unquestionably one of the most beautiful pieces of writing in the world, some of these faults are observable, particularly in the obscurity of the passage about tolta forma, the cessation of the incessant tempest, and the non-adjuration of the two lovers in the manner that Virgil prescribes.

But truly it is said, that when Dante is great, nobody surpasses him. I doubt if anybody equals him, as to the constant intensity and incessant variety of his pictures; and whatever he paints, he throws, as it were, upon its own powers; as though an artist should draw figures that started into life, and proceeded to action for themselves, frightening their creator. Every motion, word, and look of these creatures becomes full of sensibility and suggestions. The invisible is at the back of the visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence describes a character, nay, forms the most striking part of a story; a word acts as a flash of lightning, which displays some gloomy neighbourhood, where a tower is standing, with dreadful faces at the window; or where, at your feet, full of eternal voices, one abyss is beheld dropping out of another in the lurid light of torment. In the present volume a story will be found which tells a long tragedy in half-a-dozen lines. Dante has the minute probabilities of a Defoe in the midst of the loftiest and most generalising poetry; and this feeling of matter-of-fact is impressed by fictions the most improbable, nay, the most ridiculous and revolting. You laugh at the absurdity; you are shocked at the detestable cruelty; yet, for the moment, the thing almost seems as if it must be true. You feel as you do in a dream, and after it;—you wake and laugh, but the absurdity seemed true at the time; and while you laugh you shudder.

Enough of this crueller part of his genius has been exhibited; but it is seldom you can have the genius without sadness. In the circle of hell, soothsayers walk along weeping, with their faces turned the wrong way, so that their tears fall between their shoulders. The picture is still more dreadful. Warton thinks it ridiculous. But I cannot help feeling with the poet, that it is dreadfully pathetic. It is the last mortifying insult to human pretension. Warton, who has a grudge against Dante natural to a man of happier piety, thinks him ridiculous also in describing the monster Geryon lying upon the edge of one of the gulfs of hell "like a beaver" (canto xvii.). He is of opinion that the writer only does it to shew his knowledge of natural history. But surely the idea of so strange and awful a creature (a huge mild-faced man ending in a dragon's body) lying familiarly on the edge of the gulf, as a beaver does by the water, combines the supernatural with the familiar in a very impressive manner. It is this combination of extremes which is the life and soul of the whole poem; you have this world in the next; the same persons, passions, remembrances, intensified by superhuman despairs or beatitudes; the speechless entrancements of bliss, the purgatorial trials of hope and patience; the supports of hate and anger (such as they are) in hell itself; nay, of loving despairs, and a self-pity made unboundedly pathetic by endless suffering. Hence there it no love-story so affecting as that of Paulo and Francesca thus told and perpetuated in another world; no father's misery so enforced upon us as Ugolino's, who, for hundreds of years, has not grown tired of the revenge to which it wrought him. Dante even puts this weight and continuity of feeling into passages of mere transient emotion or illustration, unconnected with the next world; as in the famous instance of the verses about evening, and many others which the reader will meet with in this volume. Indeed, if pathos and the most impressive simplicity, and graceful beauty of all kinds, and abundant grandeur, can pay (as the reader, I believe, will think it does even in a prose abstract), for the pangs of moral discord and absurdity inflicted by the perusal of Dante's poem, it may challenge competition with any in point of interest. His Heaven, it is true, though containing both sublime and lovely passages, is not so good as his Earth. The more unearthly he tried to make it, the less heavenly it became. When he is content with earth in heaven itself,-when he literalises a metaphor, and with exquisite felicity finds himself arrived there in consequence of fixing his eyes on the eyes of Beatrice, then he is most celestial. But his endeavours to express degrees of beatitude and holiness by varieties of flame and light,—of dancing lights, revolving lights, lights of smiles, of stars, of starry crosses, of didactic letters and sentences, of animal figures made up of stars full of blessed souls, with saints forming an eagle's beak and David in its eye!—such superhuman attempts become for the most part tricks of theatrical machinery, on which we gaze with little curiosity and no respect.

His angels, however, are another matter. Belief was prepared for those winged human forms, and they furnished him with some of his most beautiful combinations of the natural with the supernatural. Ginguéné has remarked the singular variety as well as beauty of Dante's angels. Milton's, indeed, are commonplace in the comparison. In the eighth canto of the Inferno, the devils insolently refuse the poet and his guide an entrance into the city of Dis:—an angel comes sweeping over the Stygian lake to enforce it; the noise of his wings makes the shores tremble, and is like a crashing whirlwind such as beats down the trees and sends the peasants and their herds flying before it. The heavenly messenger, after rebuking the devils, touches the portals of the city with his wand; they fly open; and he returns the way he came without uttering a word to the two companions. His face was that of one occupied with other thoughts. This angel is announced by a tempest. Another, who brings the souls of the departed to Purgatory, is first discovered at a distance, gradually disclosing white splendours, which are his wings and garments. He comes in a boat, of which his wings are the sails; and as he approaches, it is impossible to look him in the face for its brightness. Two other angels have green wings and green garments, and the drapery is kept in motion like a flag by the vehement action of the wings. A fifth has a face like the morning star, casting forth quivering beams. A sixth is of a lustre so oppressive, that the poet feels a weight on his eyes before he knows what is coming. Another's presence affects the senses like the fragrance of a May-morning; and another is in garments dark as cinders, but has a sword in his hand too sparkling to be gazed at. Dante's occasional pictures of the beauties of external nature are worthy of these angelic creations, and to the last degree fresh and lovely. You long to bathe your eyes, smarting with the fumes of hell, in his dews. You gaze enchanted on his green fields and his celestial blue skies, the more so from the pain and sorrow in midst of which the visions are created.

Dante's grandeur of every kind is proportionate to that of his angels, almost to his ferocity; and that is saying every thing. It is not always the spiritual grandeur of Milton, the subjection of the material impression to the moral; but it is equally such when he chooses, and far more abundant. His infernal precipices—his black whirlwinds—his innumerable cries and claspings of hands—his very odours of huge loathsomeness—his giants at twilight standing up to the middle in pits, like towers, and causing earthquakes when they move—his earthquake of the mountain in Purgatory, when a spirit is set free for heaven—his dignified Mantuan Sordello, silently regarding him and his guide as they go by, "like a lion on his watch"—his blasphemer, Capaneus, lying in unconquered rage and sullenness under an eternal rain of flakes of fire (human precursor of Milton's Satan)—his aspect of Paradise, "as if the universe had smiled"—his inhabitants of the whole planet Saturn crying out so loud, in accordance with the anti-papal indignation of Saint Pietro Damiano, that the poet, though among them, could not hear what they said—and the blushing eclipse, like red clouds at sunset, which takes place at the apostle Peter's denunciation of the sanguinary filth of the court of Rome—all these sublimities, and many more, make us not know whether to be more astonished at the greatness of the poet or the raging littleness of the man. Grievous is it to be forced to bring two such opposites together; and I wish, for the honour and glory of poetry, I did not feel compelled to do so. But the swarthy Florentine had not the healthy temperament of his brethren, and he fell upon evil times. Compared with Homer and Shakspeare, his very intensity seems only superior to theirs from an excess of the morbid; and he is inferior to both in other sovereign qualities of poetry—to the one, in giving you the healthiest general impression of nature itself—to Shakspeare, in boundless universality—to most great poets, in thorough harmony and delightfulness. He wanted (generally speaking) the music of a happy and a happy-making disposition. Homer, from his large vital bosom, breathes like a broad fresh air over the world, amidst alternate storm and sunshine, making you aware that there is rough work to be faced, but also activity and beauty to be enjoyed. The feeling of health and strength is predominant. Life laughs at death itself, or meets it with a noble confidence—is not taught to dread it as a malignant goblin. Shakspeare has all the smiles as well as tears of nature, and discerns the "soul of goodness in things evil." He is comedy as well as tragedy—the entire man in all his qualities, moods, and experiences; and he beautifies all. And both those truly divine poets make nature their subject through her own inspiriting medium—not through the darkened glass of one man's spleen and resentment. Dante, in constituting himself the hero of his poem, not only renders her, in the general impression, as dreary as himself, in spite of the occasional beautiful pictures he draws of her, but narrows her very immensity into his pettiness. He fancied, alas, that he could build her universe over again out of the politics of old Rome and the divinity of the schools!

Dante, besides his great poem, and a few Latin eclogues of no great value, wrote lyrics full of Platonical sentiment, some of which anticipated the loveliest of Petrarch's; and he was the author of various prose works, political and philosophical, all more or less masterly for the time in which he lived, and all coadjutors of his poetry in fixing his native tongue. His account of his Early Life (the Vita Nuova) is a most engaging history of a boyish passion, evidently as real and true on his own side as love and truth can be, whatever might be its mistake as to its object. The treatise on the Vernacular Tongue (de Vulgari Eloquio) shews how critically he considered his materials for impressing the world, and what a reader he was of every production of his contemporaries. The Banquet (Convito) is but an abstruse commentary on some of his minor poems; but the book on Monarchy (de Monarchia) is a compound of ability and absurdity, in which his great genius is fairly overborne by the barbarous pedantry of the age. It is an argument to prove that the world must all be governed by one man; that this one man must be the successor of the Roman Emperor—God having manifestly designed the world to be subject for ever to the Roman empire; and lastly, that this Emperor is equally designed by God to be independent of the Pope—spiritually subject to him, indeed, but so far only as a good son is subject to the religious advice of his father; and thus making Church and State happy for ever in the two divided supremacies. And all this assumption of the obsolete and impossible the author gravely proves in all the forms of logic, by arguments drawn from the history of Æneas, and the providential cackle of the Roman geese!

How can the patriots of modern Italy, justified as they are in extolling the poet to the skies, see him plunge into such depths of bigotry in his verse and childishness in his prose, and consent to perplex the friends of advancement with making a type of their success out of so erring though so great a man? Such slavishness, even to such greatness, is a poor and unpromising thing, compared with an altogether unprejudiced and forward-looking self-reliance. To have no faith in names has been announced as one of their principles; and "God and Humanity" is their motto. What, therefore, has Dante's name to do with their principles? or what have the semi-barbarisms of the thirteenth century to do with the final triumph of "God and Humanity?" Dante's lauded wish for that union of the Italian States, which his fame has led them so fondly to identify with their own, was but a portion of his greater and prouder wish to see the whole world at the feet of his boasted ancestress, Rome. Not, of course, that he had no view to what he considered good and just government (for what sane despot purposes to rule without that?); but his good and just government was always to be founded on the sine qua non principle of universal Italian domination.[35]

All that Dante said or did has its interest for us in spite of his errors, because he was an earnest and suffering man and a great genius; but his fame must ever continue to lie where his greatest blame does, in his principal work. He was a gratuitous logician, a preposterous politician, a cruel theologian; but his wonderful imagination, and (considering the bitterness that was in him) still more wonderful sweetness, have gone into the hearts of his fellow-creatures, and will remain there in spite of the moral and religious absurdities with which they are mingled, and of the inability which the best-natured readers feel to associate his entire memory, as a poet, with their usual personal delight in a poet and his name.

[Footnote 1: As notices of Dante's life have often been little but repetitions of former ones, I think it due to the painstaking character of this volume to state, that besides consulting various commentators and critics, from Boccaccio to Fraticelli and others, I have diligently perused the Vita di Dante, by Cesare Balbo, with Rocco's annotations; the Histoire Littéraire d'Italie, by Ginguéné; the Discorso sul Testo della Commedia, by Foscolo; the Amori e Rime di Dante of Arrivabene; the Veltro Allegorico di Dante, by Troja; and Ozanam's Dante et la Philosophie Catholique an Treixième Siècle.]

[Footnote 2: Canto xv. 88.]

[Footnote 3: For the doubt apparently implied respecting the district, see canto xvi. 43, or the summary of it in the present volume. The following is the passage alluded to in the philosophical treatise "Risponder si vorrebbe, non colle parole, ma col coltello, a tanta bestialità." Convito,—Opere Minori, 12mo, Fir. 1834, vol. II. p. 432. "Beautiful mode" (says Perticeri in a note) "of settling questions.">[

[Footnote 4: Istorie Fiorentine, II. 43 (in Tutte le Opere, 4to, 1550).]

[Footnote 5: The name has been varied into Allagheri, Aligieri, Alleghieri, Alligheri, Aligeri, with the accent generally on the third, but sometimes on the second syllable. See Foscolo, Discorso sul Testo, p. 432. He says, that in Verona, where descendants of the poet survive, they call it Alìgeri. But names, like other words, often wander so far from their source, that it is impossible to ascertain it. Who would suppose that Pomfret came from Pontefract, or wig from parrucca? Coats of arms, unless in very special instances, prove nothing but the whims of the heralds.

Those who like to hear of anything in connexion with Dante or his name, may find something to stir their fancies in the following grim significations of the word in the dictionaries:

"Dante, a kind of great wild beast in Africa, that hath a very hard skin."—Florio's Dictionary, edited by Torreggiano.

"Dante, an animal called otherwise the Great Beast."—Vocabolario della Crusca, Compendiato, Ven. 1729.]

[Footnote 6: See the passage in "Hell," where Virgil, to express his enthusiastic approbation of the scorn and cruelty which Dante chews to one of the condemned, embraces and kisses him for a right "disdainful soul," and blesses the "mother that bore him.">[

[Footnote 7: Opere minori, vol iii 12. Flor. 1839, pp. 292 &c.]

[Footnote 8: "Béatrix quitta la terre dans tout l'éclat de la jeunesse et de la virginité." See the work as above entitled, Paris, 1840, p. 60. The words in Latin, as quoted from the will by the critic alluded to in the Foreign Quarterly Review (No._ 65, art. Dante Allighieri), are, "Bici filiæ suæ et uxori D. (Domini) Simonis de Bardis." "Bici" is the Latin dative case of Bice, the abbreviation of Beatrice. This employment, by the way, of an abbreviated name in a will, may seem to go counter to the deductions respecting the name of Dante. And it may really do so. Yet a will is not an epitaph, nor the address of a beatified spirit; neither is equal familiarity perhaps implied, as a matter of course, in the abbreviated names of male and female.]

[Footnote 9: Vita Nuova. ut sup. p. 343]

[Footnote 10: Vita Nuova, p. 345.]

[Footnote 11: In the article on Dante, in the Foreign Quarterly Review, (ut supra), the exordium of which made me hope that the eloquent and assumption-denouncing writer was going to supply a good final account of his author, equally satisfactory for its feeling and its facts, but which ended in little better than the customary gratuitousness of wholesale panegyric, I was surprised to find the union with Gemma Donati characterised as "calm and cold,—rather the accomplishment of a social duty than the result of an irresistible impulse of the heart," p. 15. The accomplishment of the "social duty" is an assumption, not very probable with regard to any body, and much less so in a fiery Italian of twenty-six; but the addition of the epithets, "calm and cold," gives it a sort of horror. A reader of this article, evidently the production of a man of ability but of great wilfulness, is tempted to express the disappointment it has given him in plainer terms than might be wished, in consequence of the extraordinary license which its writer does not scruple to allow to his own fancies, in expressing his opinion of what he is pleased to think the fancies of others.]

[Footnote 12: "Le invettive contr' essa per tanti secoli originarono dalla enumerazione rettorica del Boccaccio di tutti gli inconvenienti del matrimonio, e dove per altro ei dichiara,—'Certo io non affermo queste cose a Dante essere avvenute, che non lo so; comechè vero sia, che o a simili cose a queste, o ad altro che ne fusse cagione, egli una volta da lei partitosi, che per consolazione de' suoi affanni gli era stata data, mai nè dove ella fusse volle venire, nè sofferse che dove egli fusse ella venisse giammai, con tutto che di più figliuoli egli insieme con lei fusse parente." Discorso sul Testo, ut sup. Londra, Pickering, 1825, p. 184.]

[Footnote 13: Foscolo, in the Edinburgh review, vol. xxx. p. 351. ]

[Footnote 14: "Ahi piaciuto fosse al Dispensatore dell'universo, che la cagione della mia scusa mai non fosse stata; che nè altri contro a me avria fallato, nè io sofferto avrei pena ingiustamente; pena, dico, d'esilio e di povertà. Poichè fu piacere de' cittadini della bellissima e famosissima figlia di Roma, Florenza, di gettarmi fuori del suo dolcissimo seno (nel quale nato e nudrito fui sino al colmo della mia vita, e nel quale, con buona pace di quella, desidero con tutto il core di riposare l'animo stanco, e terminare il tempo che m'è dato); per le parti quasi tutte, alle quali questa lingua si stende, peregrino, quasi mendicando, sono andato, mostrando contro a mia voglia la piaga della fortuna, che suole ingiustamente al piagato molte volte essere imputata. Veramente io sono stato legno sanza vela e sanza governo, portato a diversi porti e foci e liti dal vento secco che vapora la dolorosa povertà; e sono vile apparito agli occhi a molti, che forse per alcuna fama in altra forma mi aveano immaginato; nel cospetto de' quali non solamente mia persona inviliò, ma di minor pregio si fece ogni opera, si già fatta, come quella che fosse a fare."-Opere Minori, ut sup. vol. ii. p. 20.]

[Footnote 15: "In licteris vestris et reverentia debita et affectione receptis, quam repatriatio mea cure sit vobis ex animo grata mente ac diligenti animaversione concepi, etenim tanto me districtius obligastis, quanto rarius exules invenire amicos contingit. ad illam vero significata respondeo: et si non eatenus qualiter forsam pusillanimitas appeteret aliquorum, ut sub examine vestri consilii ante judicium, affectuose deposco. ecce igitur quod per licteras vestri mei: que nepotis, necnon aliorum quamplurium amicorum significatum est mihi. per ordinamentum nuper factum Florentie super absolutione bannitorum. quod si solvere vellem certam pecunie quantitatem, vellemque pati notam oblationis et absolvi possem et redire ut presens. in quo quidem duo ridenda et male perconciliata sunt. Pater, dico male perconciliata per illos qui tali expresserunt: nam vestre litere discretius et consultius clausulate nicil de talibus continebant. estne ista revocatio gloriosa qua d. all. (i. e. Dantes Alligherius) revocatur ad patriam per trilustrium fere perpessus exilium? becne meruit conscientia manifesta quibuslibet? hec sudor et labor continuatus in studiis? absit a viro philosophie domestica temeraria terreni cordis humilitas, ut more cujusdam cioli et aliorum infamiam quasi vinctus ipse se patiatur offerri. absit a viro predicante justitiam, ut perpessus injuriam inferentibus. velud benemerentibus, pecuniam suam solvat. non est hec via redeundi ad patriam, Pater mi, sed si alia per vos, aut deinde per alios invenietur que fame d. (Dantis) que onori non deroget, illam non lentis passibus acceptabo. quod si per nullam talem Florentia introitur, nunquam Florentiam introibo. quidni? nonne solis astrorumque specula ubique conspiciam? nonne dulcissimas veritates potero speculari ubique sub celo, ni prius inglorium, imo ignominiosum populo, Florentineque civitati am reddam? quippe panis non deficiet.">[

[Footnote 16: Opere minori, ut sup. vol iii. p. 186.]

[Footnote 17: Veltro Allegorico di Dante, ut sup. p. 208, where the
Appendix contains the Latin original.]

[Footnote 18: See Fraticelli's Dissertation on the Convito, in Opere
Minori, ut sup. vol. ii. p. 560.]

[Footnote 19: Discorso sul Testo, p. 54.]

[Footnote 20: Balbo. Naples edition, p. 132.]

[Footnote 21: "Di se stesso presunse maravigliosamente tanto, che essendo egli glorioso nel colmo del reggimento della republica, e ragionandosi trà maggiori cittadini di mandare, per alcuna gran bisogna, ambasciata a Bonifazio Papa VIII., e che principe della ambasciata fosse Dante, ed egli in ciò in presenzia di tutti quegli che ciò consigliavano richiesto, avvenne, che soprastando egli alla risposta, alcun disse, che pensi? alle quali parole egli rispose: penso, se io vo, chi rimane; e s'io rimango, chi va: quasi esso solo fosse colui che tra tutti valesse e per cui tutti gli altri valessero." And he goes on to say respecting the stone-throwing—"Appresso, come che il nostro poeta nelle sua avversità paziente o no si fosse, in una fu impazientissimo: ed egli infino al cominciamento del suo esilio stato guelfissimo, non essendogli aperta la via del ritornare in casa sua, si fuor di modo diventò ghibellino, che ogni femminella, ogni picciol fanciullo, e quante volte avesse voluto, ragionando di parte, e la guelfa proponendo alla ghibellino, l'avrebbe non solamente fatto turbare, ma a tanta insania commosso, che se taciuto non fosse, a gittar le pietre l'avrebbe condotto." (Vita di Dante, prefixed to the Paris edition of the Commedia, 1844, p. XXV.) And then the "buon Boccaccio," with his accustomed sweetness of nature, begs pardon of so great a man, for being obliged to relate such things of him, and doubts whether his spirit may not be looking down on him that moment disdainfully from heaven! Such an association of ideas had Dante produced between the celestial and the scornful!]

[Footnote 22: Novelle di Franco Sacchetti, Milan edition, 1804, vol. ii. p. 148. It forms the setting, or frame-work, of an inferior story, and is not mentioned in the heading.]

[Footnote 23: The Vision; or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, of Dante
Alighieri, &c. Smith's edition, 1844, p. 90.]

[Footnote 24: Discorso sul Testo, pp. 64, 77-90, 335-338.]

[Footnote 25: Purgatorio, canto III. 118, 138; referred to by Foscolo, in the Discorso sul Testo, p. 383.]

[Footnote 26: Warton's History of English Poetry, edition of 1840, vol. iii. p. 214.]

[Footnote 27: Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. vol. ii. p. 122.]

[Footnote 28: Pentameron and Pentalogia, pp. 44-50.]

[Footnote 29: Discorso sul Testo, p. 226. The whole passage (sect. cx.) is very eloquent, horrible, and self-betraying.]

[Footnote 30: Discorso, as above, p. 101.]

[Footnote 31: Discorso, p. 103.]

[Footnote 32: Criticisms on the Rolliad, and Probationary Odes for the Laureateship. Third edit. 17S5, p. 317.]

[Footnote 33: The writer of the article on Dante in the Foreign Quarterly Review (as above) concedes that his hero in this passage becomes "almost cruel." Almost! Tormenting a man further, who is up to his chin in everlasting ice, and whose face he has kicked!]

[Footnote 34: "Cortesia fu lui esser villano." Inferno, canto xxxiii. 150.]

[Footnote 35: Every body sees this who is not wilfully blind. "Passionate," says the editor of the Opere Minori, "for the ancient Italian glories, and the greatness of the Roman name, he was of opinion that it was only by means of combined strength, and one common government, that Italy could be finally secured from discord in its own bosom and enemies from without, and recover its ancient empire over the whole world." "Amantissimo delle antiche glorie Italiane, e della grandezza del nome romano, ei considerava, che soltanto pel mezzo d'una general forza ed autorita poteva l'Italia dalle interne contese e dalle straniere invasioni restarsi sicura, e recuperare l'antico imperio sopra tutte le genti."—Ut sup. vol. iii. p. 8.]

THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.

I.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL.

Argument.

The infernal regions, according to Dante, are situate in the globe we inhabit, directly beneath Jerusalem, and consist of a succession of gulfs or circles, narrowing as they descend, and terminating in the centre; so that the general shape is that of a funnel. Commentators have differed as to their magnitude; but the latest calculation gives 315 miles for the diameter of the mouth or crater, and a quarter of a mile for that of its terminating point. In the middle is the abyss, pervading the whole depth, and 245 miles in diameter at the opening; which reduces the different platforms, or territories that surround it, to a size comparatively small. These territories are more or less varied with land and water, lakes, precipices, &c. A precipice, fourteen miles high, divides the first of them from the second. The passages from the upper world to the entrance are various; and the descents from one circle to another are effected by the poet and his guide in different manners-sometimes on foot through by-ways, sometimes by the conveyance of supernatural beings. The crater he finds to be the abode of those who have done neither good nor evil, caring for nothing but themselves. In the first circle are the whole unbaptised world—heathens and infants—melancholy, though not tormented. Here also is found the Elysium of Virgil, whose Charon and other infernal beings are among the agents of torment. In the second circle the torments commence with the sin of incontinence; and the punishment goes deepening with the crime from circle to circle, through gluttony, avarice, prodigality, wrath, sullenness, or unwillingness to be pleased with the creation, disbelief in God and the soul (with which the punishment by fire commences), usury, murder, suicide, blasphemy, seduction and other carnal enormities, adulation, simony, soothsaying, astrology, witchcraft, trafficking with the public interest, hypocrisy, highway robbery (on the great Italian scale), sacrilege, evil counsel, disturbance of the Church, heresy, false apostleship, alchemy, forgery, coining (all these, from seduction downwards, in one circle); then, in the frozen or lowest circle of all, treachery; and at the bottom of this is Satan, stuck into the centre of the earth.

With the centre of the globe commences the antipodean attraction of its opposite side, together with a rocky ascent out of it, through a huge ravine. The poet and his guide, on their arrival at this spot, accordingly find their position reversed; and so conclude their downward journey upwards, till they issue forth to light on the borders of the sea which contains the island of Purgatory.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL.

Dante says, that when he was half-way on his pilgrimage through this life, he one day found himself, towards nightfall, in a wood where he could no longer discern the right path. It was a place so gloomy and terrible, every thing in it growing in such a strange and savage manner, that the horror he felt returned on him whenever he thought of it. The pass of death could hardly be more bitter. Travelling through it all night with a beating heart, he at length came to the foot of a hill, and looking up, as he began to ascend it, he perceived the shoulders of the hill clad in the beams of morning; a sight which gave him some little comfort. He felt like a man who has buffeted his way to land out of a shipwreck, and who, though still anxious to get farther from his peril, cannot help turning round to gaze on the wide waters. So did he stand looking back on the pass that contained that dreadful wood. After resting a while, he again betook him up the hill; but had not gone far when he beheld a leopard bounding in front of him, and hindering his progress. After the leopard came a lion, with his head aloft, mad with hunger, and seeming to frighten the very air;[1] and after the lion, more eager still, a she-wolf, so lean that she appeared to be sharpened with every wolfish want. The pilgrim fled back in terror to the wood, where he again found himself in a darkness to which the light never penetrated. In that place, he said, the sun never spoke word.[2] But the wolf was still close upon him.[3]

While thus flying, he beheld coming towards him a man, who spoke something, but he knew not what. The voice sounded strange and feeble, as if from disuse. Dante loudly called out to him to save him, whether he was a man or only a spirit. The apparition, at whose sight the wild beasts disappeared, said that he was no longer man, though man he had been in the time of the false gods, and sung the history of the offspring of Anchises.

"And art thou, then, that Virgil," said Dante, "who has filled the world with such floods of eloquence? O glory and light of all poets, thou art my master, and thou mine author; thou alone the book from which I have gathered beauties that have gained me praise. Behold the peril I am in, and help me, for I tremble in every vein and pulse."

Virgil comforted Dante. He told him that he must quit the wood by another road, and that he himself would be his guide, leading him first to behold the regions of woe underground, and then the spirits that lived content in fire because it purified them for heaven; and then that he would consign him to other hands worthier than his own, which should raise him to behold heaven itself; for as the Pagans, of whom he was one, had been rebels to the law of him that reigns there, nobody could arrive at Paradise by their means.[4]

So saying, Virgil moved on his way, and Dante closely followed. He expressed a fear, however, as they went, lest being "neither Æneas nor St. Paul," his journey could not be worthily undertaken, nor end in wisdom. But Virgil, after sharply rebuking him for his faintheartedness, told him, that the spirit of her whom he loved, Beatrice, had come down from heaven on purpose to commend her lover to his care; upon which the drooping courage of the pilgrim was raised to an undaunted confidence; as flowers that have been closed and bowed down by frosty nights, rise all up on their stems in the morning sun.[5]

"Non vuol che 'n sua città per me sì vegna."

The Pagans could not be rebels to a law they never heard of, any more than Dante could be a rebel to Luther. But this is one of the absurdities with which the impious effrontery or scarcely less impious admissions of Dante's teachers avowedly set reason at defiance,—retaining, meanwhile, their right of contempt for the impieties of Mahometans and Brahmins; "which is odd," as the poet says; for being not less absurd, or, as the others argued, much more so, they had at least an equal claim on the submission of the reason; since the greater the irrationality, the higher the theological triumph.

"Through me is the road to the dolorous city;
Through me is the road to the everlasting sorrows;
Through me is the road to the lost people.
Justice was the motive of my exalted maker;
I was made by divine power, by consummate wisdom, and by primal love;
Before me was no created thing, if not eternal; and eternal am I also.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter."

Such were the words which Dante beheld written in dark characters over a portal. "Master," said he to Virgil, "I find their meaning hard."

"A man," answered Virgil, "must conduct himself at this door like one prepared. Hither must he bring no mistrust. Hither can come and live no cowardice. We have arrived at the place I told thee of. Here thou art to behold the dolorous people who have lost all intellectual good." [6]

So saying, Virgil placed his hand on Dante's, looking on him with a cheerful countenance; and the Florentine passed with him through the dreadful gate.

They entered upon a sightless gulf, in which was a black air without stars; and immediately heard a hubbub of groans; and wailings, and terrible things said in many languages, words of wretchedness, outcries of rage, voices loud and hoarse, and sounds of the smitings of hands one against another. Dante began to weep. The sound was as if the sand in a whirlwind were turned into noises, and filled the blind air with incessant conflict.

Yet these were not the souls of the wicked. They were those only who had lived without praise or blame, thinking of nothing but themselves. These miserable creatures were mixed with the angels who stood neutral in the war with Satan. Heaven would not dull its brightness with those angels, nor would lower hell receive them, lest the bad ones should triumph in their company.

"And what is it," said Dante, "which makes them so grievously suffer?"

"Hopelessness of death," said Virgil. "Their blind existence here, and immemorable former life, make them so wretched, that they envy every other lot. Mercy and justice alike disdain them. Let us speak of them no more. Look, and pass."

The companions went on till they came to a great river with a multitude waiting on the banks. A hoary old man appeared crossing the river towards them in a boat; and as he came, he said, "Woe to the wicked. Never expect to see heaven. I come to bear you across to the dark regions of everlasting fire and ice." Then looking at Dante, he said, "Get thee away from the dead, thou who standest there, live spirit."

"Torment thyself not, Charon," said Virgil. "He has a passport beyond thy power to question."

The shaggy cheeks of the boatman of the livid lake, who had wheels of fire about his eyes, fell at these words; and he was silent. But the naked multitude of souls whom he had spoken to changed colour, and gnashed their teeth, blaspheming God, and their parents, and the human species, and the place, and the hour, and the seed of the sowing of their birth; and all the while they felt themselves driven onwards, by a fear which became a desire, towards the cruel river-side, which awaits every one destitute of the fear of God. The demon Charon, beckoning to them with eyes like brasiers, collected them as they came, giving blows to those that lingered, with his oar. One by one they dropped into the boat like leaves from a bough in autumn, till the bough is left bare; or as birds drop into the decoy at the sound of the bird-call.

There was then an earthquake, so terrible that the recollection of it made the poet burst into a sweat at every pore. A whirlwind issued from the lamenting ground, attended by vermilion flashes; and he lost his senses, and fell like a man stupefied.

A crash of thunder through his brain woke up the pilgrim so hastily, that he shook himself like a person roused by force. He found that he was on the brink of a gulf, from which ascended a thunderous sound of innumerable groanings. He could see nothing down it. It was too dark with sooty clouds. Virgil himself turned pale, but said, "We are to go down here. I will lead the way."

"O master," said Dante, "if even thou fearest, what is to become of myself?" "It is pity, not fear," replied Virgil, "that makes me change colour."

With these words his guide led him into the first circle of hell, surrounding the abyss. The great noise gradually ceased to be heard, as they journeyed inwards, till at last they became aware of a world of sighs, which produced a trembling in the air. They were breathed by the souls of such as had died without baptism, men, women, and infants; no matter how good; no matter if they worshipped God before the coming of Christ, for they worshipped him not "properly." Virgil himself was one of them. They were all lost for no other reason; and their "only suffering" consisted in "hopeless desire!"

Dante was struck with great sorrow when he heard this, knowing how many good men must be in that place. He inquired if no one had ever been taken out of it into heaven. Virgil told him there had, and he named them; to wit, Adam, Abel, Noah, Moses, King David, obedient Abraham the patriarch, and Isaac, and Jacob, with their children, and Rachel, for whom Jacob did so much,—and "many more;" adding, however, that there was no instance of salvation before theirs.

Journeying on through spirits as thick as leaves, Dante perceived a lustre at a little distance, and observing shapes in it evidently of great dignity, inquired who they were that thus lived apart from the rest. Virgil said that heaven thus favoured them by reason of their renown on earth. A voice was then heard exclaiming, "Honour and glory to the lofty poet! Lo, his shade returns." Dante then saw four other noble figures coming towards them, of aspect neither sad nor cheerful.

"Observe him with the sword in his hand," said Virgil, as they were advancing. "That is Homer, the poets' sovereign. Next to him comes Horace the satirist; then Ovid; and the last is Lucan."

"And thus I beheld," says Dante, "the bright school of the loftiest of poets, who flies above the rest like an eagle."

For a while the illustrious spirits talked together, and then turned to the Florentine with a benign salutation, at which his master smiled and "further honour they did me," adds the father of Italian poetry, "for they admitted me of their tribe; so that to a band of that high account I added a sixth." [7]

The spirits returned towards the bright light in which they lived, talking with Dante by the way, and brought him to a magnificent castle, girt with seven lofty walls, and further defended with a river, which they all passed as if it had been dry ground. Seven gates conducted them into a meadow of fresh green, the resort of a race whose eyes moved with a deliberate soberness, and whose whole aspects were of great authority, their voices sweet, and their speech seldom.[8] Dante was taken apart to an elevation in the ground, so that he could behold them all distinctly; and there, on the "enamelled green," [9] were pointed out to him the great spirits, by the sight of whom he felt exalted in his own esteem. He saw Electra with many companions, among whom were Hector and Æneas, and Cæsar in armour with his hawk's eyes; and on another side he beheld old King Latinus with his daughter Lavinia, and the Brutus that expelled Tarquin, and Lucretia, and Julia, and Cato's wife Marcia, and the mother of the Gracchi, and, apart by himself, the Sultan Saladin. He then raised his eyes a little, and beheld the "master of those who know" [10] (Aristotle), sitting amidst the family of philosophers, and honoured by them all. Socrates and Plato were at his side. Among the rest was Democritus, who made the world a chance, and Diogenes, and Heraclitus, &c. and Dioscorides, the good gatherer of simples. Orpheus also he saw, and Cicero, and the moral Seneca, and Euclid, and Hippocrates, and Avicen, and Averroes, who wrote the great commentary, and others too numerous to mention. The company of six became diminished to two, and Virgil took him forth on a far different road, leaving that serene air for a stormy one; and so they descended again into darkness.

It was the second circle into which they now came—a sphere narrower than the first, and by so much more the wretcheder. Minos sat at the entrance, gnarling—he that gives sentence on every one that comes, and intimates the circle into which each is to be plunged by the number of folds into which he casts his tail round about him. Minos admonished Dante to beware how he entered unbidden, and warned him against his conductor; but Virgil sharply rebuked the judge, and bade him not set his will against the will that was power.

The pilgrims then descended through hell-mouth, till they came to a place dark as pitch, that bellowed with furious cross-winds, like a sea in a tempest. It was the first place of torment, and the habitation of carnal sinners. The winds, full of stifled voices, buffeted the souls for ever, whirling them away to and fro, and dashing them against one another. Whenever it seized them for that purpose, the wailing and the shrieking was loudest, crying out against the Divine Power. Sometimes a whole multitude came driven in a body like starlings before the wind, now hither and thither, now up, now down; sometimes they went in a line like cranes, when a company of those birds is beheld sailing along in the air, uttering its dolorous clangs.

Dante, seeing a group of them advancing, inquired of Virgil who they were. "Who are these," said he, "coming hither, scourged in the blackest part of the hurricane?"

"She at the head of them," said Virgil, "was empress over many nations. So foul grew her heart with lust, that she ordained license to be law, to the end that herself might be held blameless. She is Semiramis, of whom it is said that she gave suck to Ninus, and espoused him. Leading the multitude next to her is Dido, she that slew herself for love, and broke faith to the ashes of Sichaeus; and she that follows with the next is the luxurious woman, Cleopatra."

Dante then saw Helen, who produced such a world of misery; and the great Achilles, who fought for love till it slew him; and Paris; and Tristan; and a thousand more whom his guide pointed at, naming their names, every one of whom was lost through love.

The poet stood for a while speechless for pity, and like one bereft of his wits. He then besought leave to speak to a particular couple who went side by side, and who appeared to be borne before the wind with speed lighter than the rest. His conductor bade him wait till they came nigher, and then to entreat them gently by the love which bore them in that manner, and they would stop and speak with him. Dante waited his time, and then lifted up his voice between the gusts of wind, and adjured the two "weary souls" to halt and have speech with him, if none forbade their doing so; upon which they came to him, like doves to the nest.[11]

There was a lull in the tempest, as if on purpose to let them speak; and the female addressed Dante, saying, that as he showed such pity for their state, they would have prayed heaven to give peace and repose to his life, had they possessed the friendship of heaven.[12]

"Love," she said, "which is soon kindled in a gentle heart, seized this my companion for the fair body I once inhabited—how deprived of it, my spirit is bowed to recollect. Love, which compels the beloved person upon thoughts of love, seized me in turn with a delight in his passion so strong, that, as thou seest, even here it forsakes me not. Love brought us both to one end. The punishment of Cain awaits him that slew us."

The poet was struck dumb by this story. He hung down his head, and stood looking on the ground so long, that his guide asked him what was in his mind. "Alas!" answered he, "such then was this love, so full of sweet thoughts; and such the pass to which it brought them! Oh, Francesca!" he cried, turning again to the sad couple, "thy sufferings make me weep. But tell me, I pray thee, what was it that first made thee know, for a certainty, that his love was returned?—that thou couldst refuse him thine no longer?"

"There is not a greater sorrow," answered she, "than calling to mind happy moments in the midst of wretchedness.[13] But since thy desire is so great to know our story to the root, hear me tell it as well as I may for tears. It chanced, one day, that we sat reading the tale of Sir Launcelot, how love took him in thrall. We were alone, and had no suspicion. Often, as we read, our eyes became suspended,[14] and we changed colour; but one passage alone it was that overcame us. When we read how Genevra smiled, and how the lover, out of the depth of his love, could not help kissing that smile, he that is never more to be parted from me kissed me himself on the mouth, all in a tremble. Never had we go-between but that book. The writer was the betrayer. That day we read no more."

While these words were being uttered by one of the spirits, the other wailed so bitterly, that the poet thought he should have died for pity. His senses forsook him, and he fell flat on the ground, as a dead body falls.[15]

On regaining his senses, the poet found himself in the third circle of hell, a place of everlasting wet, darkness, and cold, one heavy slush of hail and mud, emitting a squalid smell. The triple-headed dog Cerberus, with red eyes and greasy black beard, large belly, and hands with claws, barked above the heads of the wretches who floundered in the mud, tearing, skinning, and dismembering them, as they turned their sore and soddened bodies from side to side. When he saw the two living men, he showed his fangs, and shook in every limb for desire of their flesh. Virgil threw lumps of dirt into his mouth, and so they passed him.

It was the place of Gluttons. The travellers passed over them, as if they had been ground to walk upon. But one of them sat up, and addressed the Florentine as his acquaintance. Dante did not know him, for the agony in his countenance. He was a man nicknamed Hog (Ciacco), and by no other name does the poet, or any one else, mention him. His countryman addressed him by it, though declaring at the same time that he wept to see him. Hog prophesied evil to his discordant native city, adding that there were but two just men in it—all the rest being given up to avarice, envy, and pride. Dante inquired by name respecting the fate of five other Florentines, who had done good, and was informed that they were all, for various offences, in lower gulfs of hell. Hog then begged that he would mention having seen him when he returned to the sweet world; and so, looking at him a little, bent his head, and disappeared among his blinded companions.

"Satan! hoa, Satan!" roared the demon Plutus, as the poets were descending into the fourth circle.

"Peace!" cried Virgil, "with thy swollen lip, thou accursed wolf. No one can hinder his coming down. God wills it." [16]

Flat fell Plutus, collapsed, like the sails of a vessel when the mast is split.

This circle was the most populous one they had yet come to. The sufferers, gifted with supernatural might, kept eternally rolling round it, one against another, with terrific violence, and so dashing apart, and returning. "Why grasp?" cried the one—"Why throw away?" cried the other; and thus exclaiming, they dashed furiously together.

They were the Avaricious and the Prodigal. Multitudes of them were churchmen, including cardinals and popes. Not all the gold beneath the moon could have purchased them a moment's rest. Dante asked if none of them were to be recognised by their countenances. Virgil said, "No;" for the stupid and sullied lives which they led on earth swept their faces away from all distinction for ever.

In discoursing of fortune, they descend by the side of a torrent, black as ink, into the fifth circle, or place of torment for the Angry, the Sullen, and the Proud. Here they first beheld a filthy marsh, full of dirty naked bodies, that in everlasting rage tore one another to pieces. In a quieter division of the pool were seen nothing but bubbles, carried by the ascent, from its slimy bottom, of the stifled words of the sullen. They were always saying, "We were sad and dark within us in the midst of the sweet sunshine, and now we live sadly in the dark bogs." The poets walked on till they came to the foot of a tower, which hung out two blazing signals to another just discernible in the distance. A boat came rapidly towards them, ferried by the wrathful Phlegyas;[17] who cried out, "Aha, felon! and so thou hast come at last!"

"Thou errest," said Virgil. "We come for no longer time than it will take thee to ferry us across thy pool."

Phlegyas looked like one defrauded of his right; but proceeded to convey them. During their course a spirit rose out of the mire, looking Dante in the face, and said, "Who art thou, that comest before thy time?"

"Who art thou?" said Dante.

"Thou seest who I am," answered the other; "one among the mourners."

"Then mourn still, and howl, accursed spirit," returned the Florentine.
"I know thee, all over filth as thou art."

The wretch in fury laid hold of the boat, but Virgil thrust him back, exclaiming, "Down with thee! down among the other dogs!"

Then turning to Dante, he embraced and kissed him, saying, "O soul, that knows how to disdain, blessed be she that bore thee! Arrogant, truly, upon earth was this sinner, nor is his memory graced by a single virtue. Hence the furiousness of his spirit now. How many kings are there at this moment lording it as gods, who shall wallow here, as he does, like swine in the mud, and be thought no better of by the world!" "I should like to see him smothering in it," said Dante, "before we go."

"A right wish," said Virgil, "and thou shalt, to thy heart's content."

On a sudden the wretch's muddy companions seized and drenched him so horribly that (exclaims Dante) "I laud and thank God for it now at this moment."

"Have at him!" cried they; "have at Filippo Argenti;" and the wild fool of a Florentine dashed his teeth for rage into his own flesh.[18]

The poet's attention was now drawn off by a noise of lamentation, and he perceived that he was approaching the city of Dis.[19] The turrets glowed vermilion with the fire within it, the walls appeared to be of iron, and moats were round about them. The boat circuited the walls till the travellers came to a gate, which Phlegyas, with a loud voice, told them to quit the boat and enter. But a thousand fallen angels crowded over the top of the gate, refusing to open it, and making furious gestures. At length they agreed to let Virgil speak with them inside; and he left Dante for a while, standing in terror without. The parley was in vain. They would not let them pass. Virgil, however, bade his companion be of good cheer, and then stood listening and talking to himself; disclosing by his words his expectation of some extraordinary assistance, and at the same time his anxiety for its arrival. On a sudden, three raging figures arose over the gate, coloured with gore. Green hydras twisted about them; and their fierce temples had snakes instead of hair.

"Look," said Virgil. "The Furies! The one on the left is Megæra; Alecto is she that is wailing on the right; and in the middle is Tisiphone." Virgil then hushed. The Furies stood clawing their breasts, smiting their hands together, and raising such hideous cries, that Dante clung to his friend.

"Bring the Gorgon's head!" cried the Furies, looking down; "turn him to adamant!"

"Turn round," said Virgil, "and hide thy face; for if thou beholdest the Gorgon, never again wilt thou see the light of day." And with these words he seized Dante and turned him round himself, clapping his hands over his companion's eyes.

And now was heard coming over the water a terrible crashing noise, that made the banks on either side of it tremble. It was like a hurricane which comes roaring through the vain shelter of the woods, splitting and hurling away the boughs, sweeping along proudly in a huge cloud of dust, and making herds and herdsmen fly before it. "Now stretch your eyesight across the water," said Virgil, letting loose his hands;—"there, where the smoke of the foam is thickest." Dante looked; and saw a thousand of the rebel angels, like frogs before a serpent, swept away into a heap before the coming of a single spirit, who flew over the tops of the billows with unwet feet. The spirit frequently pushed the gross air from before his face, as if tired of the base obstacle; and as he came nearer, Dante, who saw it was a messenger from heaven, looked anxiously at Virgil. Virgil motioned him to be silent and bow down.

The angel, with a face full of scorn, as soon as he arrived at the gate, touched it with a wand that he had in his hand, and it flew open.

"Outcasts of heaven," said he; "despicable race! whence this fantastical arrogance? Do ye forget that your torments are laid oil thicker every time ye kick against the Fates? Do ye forget how your Cerberus was bound and chained till he lost the hair off his neck like a common dog?"

So saying he turned swiftly and departed the way he came, not addressing a word to the travellers. His countenance had suddenly a look of some other business, totally different from the one he had terminated.

The companions passed in, and beheld a place full of tombs red-hot. It was the region of Arch heretics and their followers. Dante and his guide passed round betwixt the walls and the sepulchres as in a churchyard, and came to the quarter which held Epicurus and his sect, who denied the existence of spirit apart from matter. The lids of the tombs remaining unclosed till the day of judgment, the soul of a noble Florentine, Farinata degli Uberti, hearing Dante speak, addressed him as a countryman, asking him to stop.[20] Dante, alarmed, beheld him rise half out of his sepulchre, looking as lofty as if he scorned hell itself. Finding who Dante was, he boasted of having three times expelled the Guelphs. "Perhaps so," said the poet; "but they came back again each time; an art which their enemies have not yet acquired."

A visage then appeared from out another tomb, looking eagerly, as if it expected to see some one else. Being disappointed, the tears came into its eyes, and the sufferer said, "If it is thy genius that conducts thee hither, where is my son, and why is he not with thee?"

"It is not my genius that conducts me," said Dante, "but that of one, whom perhaps thy son held in contempt."

"How sayest thou?" cried the shade;—"held in contempt? He is dead then? He beholds no longer the sweet light?" And with these words he dropped into his tomb, and was seen no more. It was Cavalcante Cavalcanti, the father of the poet's friend, Guido.[21]

The shade of Farinata, who had meantime been looking on, now replied to the taunt of Dante, prophesying that he should soon have good reason to know that the art he spoke of had been acquired; upon which Dante, speaking with more considerateness to the lofty sufferer, requested to know how the gift of prophecy could belong to spirits who were ignorant of the time present. Farinata answered that so it was; just as there was a kind of eyesight which could discern things at a distance though not at hand. Dante then expressed his remorse at not having informed Cavalcante that his son was alive. He said it was owing to his being overwhelmed with thought on the subject he had just mentioned, and entreated Farinata to tell him so.

Quitting this part of the cemetery, Virgil led him through the midst of it towards a descent into a valley, from which there ascended a loathsome odour. They stood behind one of the tombs for a while, to accustom themselves to the breath of it; and then began to descend a wild fissure in a rock, near the mouth of which lay the infamy of Crete, the Minotaur. The monster beholding them gnawed himself for rage; and on their persisting to advance, began plunging like a bull when he is stricken by the knife of the butcher. They succeeded, however, in entering the fissure before he recovered sufficiently from his madness to run at them; and at the foot of the descent, came to a river of boiling blood, on the strand of which ran thousands of Centaurs armed with bows and arrows. In the blood, more or less deep according to the amount of the crime, and shrieking as they boiled, were the souls of the Inflicters of Violence; and if any of them emerged from it higher than he had a right to do, the Centaurs drove him down with their arrows. Nessus, the one that bequeathed Hercules the poisoned garment, came galloping towards the pilgrims, bending his bow, and calling out from a distance to know who they were; but Virgil, disdaining his hasty character, would explain himself only to Chiron, the Centaur who instructed Achilles. Chiron, in consequence, bade Nessus accompany them along the river; and there they saw tyrants immersed up to the eyebrows;—Alexander the Great among them, Dionysius of Syracuse, and Ezzelino the Paduan. There was one of the Pazzi of Florence, and Rinieri of Corneto (infestors of the public ways), now shedding bloody tears, and Attila the Scourge, and Pyrrhus king of Epirus. Further on, among those immersed up to the throat, was Guy de Montfort the Englishman, who slew his father's slayer, Prince Henry, during divine service, in the bosom of God; and then by degrees the river became shallower and shallower till it covered only the feet; and here the Centaur quitted the pilgrims, and they crossed over into a forest.

The forest was a trackless and dreadful forest—the leaves not green, but black—the boughs not freely growing, but knotted and twisted—the fruit no fruit, but thorny poison. The Harpies wailed among the trees, occasionally showing their human faces; and on every side of him Dante heard lamenting human voices, but could see no one from whom they came. "Pluck one of the boughs," said Virgil. Dante did so; and blood and a cry followed it.

"Why pluckest thou me?" said the trunk. "Men have we been, like thyself; but thou couldst not use us worse, had we been serpents." The blood and words came out together, as a green bough hisses and spits in the fire.

The voice was that of Piero delle Vigne, the good chancellor of the Emperor Frederick the Second. Just though he had been to others, he was thus tormented for having been unjust to himself; for, envy having wronged him to his sovereign, who sentenced him to lose his eyes, he dashed his brains out against a wall. Piero entreated Dante to vindicate his memory. The poet could not speak for pity; so Virgil made the promise for him, inquiring at the same time in what manner it was that Suicides became thus identified with trees, and how their souls were to rejoin their bodies at the day of judgment. Piero said, that the moment the fierce self-murderer's spirit tore itself from the body, and passed before Charon, it fell, like a grain of corn, into that wood, and so grew into a tree. The Harpies then fed on its leaves, causing both pain and a vent for lamentation. The body it would never again enter, having thus cast away itself, but it would finally drag the body down to it by a violent attraction; and every suicide's carcass will be hung upon the thorn of its wretched shade.

The naked souls of two men, whose profusion had brought them to a violent end, here came running through the wood from the fangs of black female mastiff's—leaving that of a suicide to mourn the havoc which their passage had made of his tree. He begged his countryman to gather his leaves up, and lay them at the foot of his trunk, and Dante did so; and then he and Virgil proceeded on their journey.

They issued from the wood on a barren sand, flaming hot, on which multitudes of naked souls lay down, or sat huddled up, or restlessly walked about, trying to throw from them incessant flakes of fire, which came down like a fall of snow. They were the souls of the Impious. Among them was a great spirit, who lay scornfully submitting himself to the fiery shower, as though it had not yet ripened him.[22] Overhearing Dante ask his guide who he was, he answered for himself, and said, "The same dead as living. Jove will tire his flames out before they conquer me."

"Capaneus," exclaimed Virgil, "thy pride is thy punishment. No martyrdom were sufficient for thee, equal to thine own rage." The besieger of Thebes made no reply.

In another quarter of the fiery shower the pilgrims met a crowd of Florentines, mostly churchmen, whose offence is not to be named; after which they beheld Usurers; and then arrived at a huge waterfall, which fell into the eighth circle, or that of the Fraudulent. Here Virgil, by way of bait to the monster Geryon, or Fraud, let down over the side of the waterfall the cord of St. Francis, which Dante wore about his waist,[23] and presently the dreadful creature came up, and sate on the margin of the fall, with his serpent's tail hanging behind him in the air, after the manner of a beaver; but the point of the tail was occasionally seen glancing upwards. He was a gigantic reptile, with the face of a just man, very mild. He had shaggy claws for arms, and a body variegated all over with colours that ran in knots and circles, each within the other, richer than any Eastern drapery. Virgil spoke apart to him, and then mounted on his back, bidding his companion, who was speechless for terror, do the salve. Geryon pushed back with them from the edge of the precipice, like a ship leaving harbour; and then, turning about, wheeled, like a sullen successless falcon, slowly down through the air in many a circuit. Dante would not have known that he was going downward, but for the air that struck up wards on his face. Presently they heard the crash of the waterfall on the circle below, and then distinguished flaming fires and the noises of suffering. The monster Geryon, ever sullen as the falcon who seats himself at a distance from his dissatisfied master, shook his riders from off his back to the water's side, and then shot away like an arrow.

This eighth circle of hell is called Evil-Budget,[24] and consists of ten compartments, or gulfs of torment, crossed and connected with one another by bridges of flint. In the first were beheld Pimps and Seducers, scourged like children by horned devils; in the second, Flatterers, begrimed with ordure; in the third, Simonists, who were stuck like plugs into circular apertures, with their heads downwards, and their legs only discernible, the soles of their feet glowing with a fire which made them incessantly quiver. Dante, going down the side of the gulf with Virgil, was allowed to address one of them who seemed in greater agony than the rest; and, doing so, the sufferer cried out in a malignant rapture, "Aha, is it thou that standest there, Boniface?[25] Thou hast come sooner than it was prophesied." It was the soul of Pope Nicholas the Third that spoke. Dante undeceived and then sternly rebuked him for his avarice and depravity, telling him that nothing but reverence for the keys of St. Peter hindered him from using harsher words, and that it was such as he that the Evangelist beheld in the vision, when he saw the woman with seven heads and ten horns, who committed whoredom with the kings of the earth.

"O Constantine!" exclaimed the poet, "of what a world of evil was that dowry the mother, which first converted the pastor of the church into a rich man!" [26] The feet of the guilty pope spun with fiercer agony at these words; and Virgil, looking pleased on Dante, returned with him the way he came, till they found themselves on the margin of the fourth gulf, the habitation of the souls of False Prophets.

It was a valley, in which the souls came walking along, silent and weeping, at the pace of choristers who chant litanies. Their faces were turned the wrong way, so that the backs of their heads came foremost, and their tears fell on their loins. Dante was so overcome at the sight, that he leant against a rock and wept; but Virgil rebuked him, telling him that no pity at all was the only pity fit for that place.[27] There was Amphiaraus, whom the earth opened and swallowed up at Thebes; and Tiresias, who was transformed from sex to sex; and Aruns, who lived in a cavern on the side of the marble mountains of Carrara, looking out on the stars and ocean; and Manto, daughter of Tiresias (her hind tresses over her bosom), who wandered through the world till she came and lived in the solitary fen, whence afterwards arose the city of Mantua; and Michael Scot, the magician, with his slender loins;[28] and Eurypylus, the Grecian augur, who gave the signal with Calchas at Troy when to cut away the cables for home. He came stooping along, projecting his face over his swarthy shoulders. Guido Bonatti, too, was there, astrologer of Forli; and Ardente, shoemaker of Parma, who now wishes he had stuck to his last; and the wretched women who quit the needle and the distaff to wreak their malice with herbs and images. Such was the punishment of those who, desiring to see too far before them, now looked only behind them, and walked the reverse way of their looking.

The fifth gulf was a lake of boiling pitch, constantly heaving and subsiding throughout, and bubbling with the breath of those within it. They were Public Peculators. Winged black devils were busy about the lake, pronging the sinners when they occasionally darted up their backs for relief like dolphins, or thrust out their jaws like frogs. Dante at first looked eagerly down into the gulf, like one who feels that he shall turn away instantly out of the very horror that attracts him. "See—look behind thee!" said Virgil, dragging him at the same time from the place where he stood, to a covert behind a crag. Dante looked round, and beheld a devil coming up with a newly-arrived sinner across his shoulders, whom he hurled into the lake, and then dashed down after him, like a mastiff let loose on a thief. It was a man from Lucca, where every soul was a false dealer except Bonturo.[29] The devil called out to other devils, and a heap of them fell upon the wretch with hooks as he rose to the surface; telling him, that he must practise there in secret, if he practised at all; and thrusting him back into the boiling pitch, as cooks thrust back flesh into the pot. The devils were of the lowest and most revolting habits, of which they made disgusting jest and parade.

Some of them, on a sudden, perceived Dante and his guide, and were going to seize them, when Virgil resorted to his usual holy rebuke. For a while they let him alone; and Dante saw one of them haul a sinner out of the pitch by the clotted locks, and hold him up sprawling like an otter. The rest then fell upon him and flayed him.

It was Ciampolo, a peculator in the service of the good Thiebault, king of Navarre. One of his companions under the pitch was Friar Gomita, governor of Gallura; and another, Michael Zanche, also a Sardinian. Ciampolo ultimately escaped by a trick out of the hands of the devils, who were so enraged that they turned upon the two pilgrims; but Virgil, catching up Dante with supernatural force, as a mother does a child in a burning house, plunged with him out of their jurisdiction into the borders of gulf the sixth, the region of Hypocrites.

The hypocrites, in perpetual tears, walked about in a wearisome and exhausted manner, as if ready to faint. They wore huge cowls, which hung over their eyes, and the outsides of which were gilded, but the insides of lead. Two of them had been rulers of Florence; and Dante was listening to their story, when his attention was called off by the sight of a cross, on which Caiaphas the High Priest was writhing, breathing hard all the while through his beard with sighs. It was his office to see that every soul which passed him, on its arrival in the place, was oppressed with the due weight. His father-in-law, Annas, and all his council, were stuck in like manner on crosses round the borders of the gulf. The pilgrims beheld little else in this region of weariness, and soon passed into the borders of one of the most terrible portions of Evil-budget, the land of the transformation of Robbers.

The place was thronged with serpents of the most appalling and unwonted description, among which ran tormented the naked spirits of the robbers, agonised with fear. Their hands were bound behind them with serpents—their bodies pierced and enfolded with serpents. Dante saw one of the monsters leap up and transfix a man through the nape of the neck; when, lo! sooner than a pen could write o, or i, the sufferer burst into flames, burnt up, fell to the earth a heap of ashes—was again brought together, and again became a man, aghast with his agony, and staring about him, sighing.[30] Virgil asked him who he was.

"I was but lately rained down into this dire gullet," said the man, "amidst a shower of Tuscans. The beast Vanni Fucci am I, who led a brutal life, like the mule that I was, in that den Pistoia."

"Compel him to stop," said Dante, "and relate what brought him hither. I knew the bloody and choleric wretch when he was alive."

The sinner, who did not pretend to be deaf to these words, turned round to the speaker with the most painful shame in his face, and said, "I feel more bitterly at being caught here by thee in this condition, than when I first arrived. A power which I cannot resist compels me to let thee know, that I am here because I committed sacrilege and charged another with the crime; but now, mark me, that thou mayest hear something not to render this encounter so pleasant: Pistoia hates thy party of the Whites, and longs for the Blacks back again. It will have them, and so will Florence; and there will be a bloody cloud shall burst over the battlefield of Piceno, which will dash many Whites to the earth. I tell thee this to make thee miserable."

So saying, the wretch gave a gesture of contempt with his thumb and finger towards heaven, and said, "Take it, God—a fig for thee!" [31]

"From that instant," said Dante, "the serpents and I were friends; for one of them throttled him into silence, and another dashed his hands into a knot behind his back. O Pistoia! Pistoia! why art not thou thyself turned into ashes, and swept from the face of the earth, since thy race has surpassed in evil thine ancestors? Never, through the whole darkness of hell, beheld I a blasphemer so dire as this—not even Capaneus himself."

The Pistoian fled away with the serpents upon him, followed by a Centaur, who came madly galloping up, crying, "Where is the caitiff?" It was the monster-thief Cacus, whose den upon earth often had a pond of blood before it, and to whom Hercules, in his rage, when he slew him, gave a whole hundred blows with his club, though the wretch perceived nothing after the ninth. He was all over adders up to the mouth; and upon his shoulders lay a dragon with its wings open, breathing fire on whomsoever it met.

The Centaur tore away; and Dante and Virgil were gazing after him, when they heard voices beneath the bank on which they stood, crying, "Who are ye?" The pilgrims turned their eyes downwards, and beheld three spirits, one of whom, looking about him, said, "Where's Cianfa?" Dante made a sign to Virgil to say nothing.

Cianfa came forth, a man lately, but now a serpent with six feet.[32]

"If thou art slow to believe, reader, what I am about to tell thee," says the poet, "be so; it is no marvel; for I myself, even now, scarcely credit what I beheld."

The six-footed serpent sprang at one of the three men front to front, clasping him tightly with all its legs, and plunging his fangs into either cheek. Ivy never stuck so close to a tree as the horrible monster grappled with every limb of that pinioned man. The two forms then gradually mingled into one another like melting wax, the colours of their skin giving way at the same time to a third colour, as the white in a piece of burning paper recedes before the brown, till it all becomes black. The other two human shapes looked on, exclaiming, "Oh, how thou changest, Agnello! See, thou art neither two nor yet one." And truly, though the two heads first became one, there still remained two countenances in the face. The four arms then became but two, and such also became the legs and thighs; and the two trunks became such a body as was never beheld; and the hideous twofold monster walked slowly away.[33]

A small black serpent on fire now flashed like lightning on to the body of one of the other two, piercing him in the navel, and then falling on the ground, and lying stretched before him. The wounded man, fascinated and mute, stood looking at the adder's eyes, and endeavouring to stand steady on his legs, yawning the while as if smitten with lethargy or fever; the adder, on his part, looked up at the eyes of the man, and both of them breathed hard, and sent forth a smoke that mingled into one volume.

And now, let Lucan never speak more of the wretched Sabellus or Nisidius, but listen and be silent; and now, let Ovid be silent, nor speak again of his serpent that was Cadmus, or his fountain that was Arethusa; for, says the Tuscan poet, I envy him not. Never did he change the natures of two creatures face to face, so that each received the form of the other.

With corresponding impulse, the serpent split his train into a fork, while the man drew his legs together into a train; the skin of the serpent grew soft, while the man's hardened; the serpent acquired tresses of hair, the man grew hairless; the claws of the one projected into legs, while the arms of the other withdrew into his shoulders; the face of the serpent, as it rose from the ground, retreated towards the temples, pushing out human ears; that of the man, as he fell to the ground, thrust itself forth into a muzzle, withdrawing at the same time its ears into its head, as the slug does its horns; and each creature kept its impious eyes fixed on the other's, while the features beneath the eyes were changing. The soul which had become the serpent then turned to crawl away, hissing in scorn as he departed; and the serpent, which had become the man, spat after him, and spoke words at him. The new human-looking soul then turned his back on his late adversary, and said to the third spirit, who remained unchanged, "Let Buoso now take to his crawl, as I have done."

The two then hastened away together, leaving Dante in a state of bewildered amazement, yet not so confused but that he recognised the unchanged one for another of his countrymen, Puccio the Lame. "Joy to thee, Florence!" cried the poet; "not content with having thy name bruited over land and sea, it flourishes throughout hell."

The pilgrims now quitted the seventh, and looked down from its barrier into the eighth gulf, where they saw innumerable flames, distinct from one another, flickering all over the place like fire-flies.

"In those flames," said Virgil, "are souls, each tormented with the fire that swathes it."

"I observe one," said Dante, "divided at the summit. Are the Theban brothers in it?"

"No," replied Virgil; "in that flame are Diomed and Ulysses." The sinners punished in this gulf were Evil Counsellors; and those two were the advisers of the stratagem of the Trojan horse.

Virgil addressed Ulysses, who told him the conclusion of his adventures, not to be found in books: how he tired of an idle life, and sailed forth again into the wide ocean; and how he sailed so far that he came into a region of new stars, and in sight of a mountain, the loftiest he ever saw; when, unfortunately, a hurricane fell upon them from the shore, thrice whirled their vessel round, then dashed the stern up in air and the prow under water, and sent the billows over their heads.

"Enough," said Virgil; "I trouble thee no more." The soul of Guido di Montefeltro, overhearing the great Mantuan speak in a Lombard dialect, asked him news of the state of things in Romagna; and then told him how he had lost his chance of paradise, by thinking Pope Boniface could at once absolve him from his sins, and use them for his purposes.[34] He was going to heaven, he said, by the help of St. Francis, who came on purpose to fetch him, when a black angel met them, and demanded his absolved, indeed, but unrepented victim. "To repent evil, and to will to do it, at one and the same time, are," said the dreadful angel, "impossible: therefore wrong me not."

"Oh, how I shook," said the unhappy Guido, "when he laid his hands upon me!" And with these words the flame writhed and beat itself about for agony, and so took its way.

The pilgrims crossed over to the banks of the ninth gulf, where the
Sowers of Scandal, the Schismatics, Heretics, and Founders of False
Religions, underwent the penalties of such as load themselves with the
sins of those whom they seduce.

The first sight they beheld was Mahomet, tearing open his own bowels, and calling out to them to mark him. Before him walked his son-in-law, Ali, weeping, and cloven to the chin; and the divisions in the church were punished in like manner upon all the schismatics in the place. They all walked round the circle, their gashes closing as they went; and on their reaching a certain point, a fiend hewed them open again with a sword. The Arabian prophet, ere he passed on, bade the pilgrims warn Friar Dolcino how he suffered himself to be surprised in his mountain-hold by the starvations of winter-time, if he did not wish speedily to follow him.[35]

Among other mangled wretches, they beheld Piero of Medicina, a sower of dissension, exhibiting to them his face and throat all over wounds; and Curio, compelled to shew his tongue cut out for advising Cæsar to cross the Rubicon; and Mosca de' Lamberti, an adviser of assassination, and one of the authors of the Guelf and Ghibelline miseries, holding up the bleeding stumps of his arms, which dripped on his face. "Remember Mosca," cried he; "remember him, alas! who said, 'A deed done is a thing ended.' A bad saying of mine was that for the Tuscan nation."

"And death to thy family," cried Dante.

The assassin hurried away like a man driven mad with grief upon grief; and Dante now beheld a sight, which, if it were not, he says, for the testimony of a good conscience—that best of friends, which gives a man assurance of himself under the breastplate of a spotless innocence[36]—he should be afraid to relate without further proof. He saw—and while he was writing the account of it he still appeared to see—a headless trunk about to come past him with the others. It held its severed head by the hair, like a lantern; and the head looked up at the two pilgrims, and said, "Woe is me!" The head was, in fact, a lantern to the paths of the trunk; and thus there were two separated things in one, and one in two; and how that could be, he only can tell who ordained it. As the figure came nearer, it lifted the head aloft, that the pilgrims might hear better what it said. "Behold," it said, "behold, thou that walkest living among the dead, and say if there be any punishment like this. I am Bertrand de Born, he that incited John of England to rebel against his father. Father and son I set at variance—closest affections I set at variance—and hence do I bear my brain severed from the body on which it grew. In me behold the work of retribution." [37]

The eyes of Dante were so inebriate with all that diversity of bleeding wounds, that they longed to stay and weep ere his guide proceeded further. Something also struck them on the sudden which added to his desire to stop. But Virgil asked what ailed him, and why he stood gazing still on the wretched multitude. "Thou hast not done so," continued he, "in any other portion of this circle; and the valley is twenty-two miles further about, and the moon already below us. Thou hast more yet to see than thou wottest of, and the time is short."

Dante, excusing himself for the delay, and proceeding to follow his leader, said he thought he had seen, in the cavern at which he was gazing so hard, a spirit that was one of his own family—and it was so. It was the soul of Geri del Bello, a cousin of the poet's. Virgil said that he had observed him, while Dante was occupied with Bertrand de Born, pointing at his kinsman in a threatening manner. "Waste not a thought on him," concluded the Roman, "but leave him as he is." "O honoured guide!" said Dante, "he died a violent death, which his kinsmen have not yet avenged; and hence it is that he disdained to speak to me; and I must needs feel for him the more on that account." [38]

They came now to the last partition of the circle of Evil-budget, and their ears were assailed with such a burst of sharp wailings, that Dante was fain to close his with his hands. The misery there, accompanied by a horrible odour, was as if all the hospitals in the sultry marshes of Valdichiana had brought their maladies together into one infernal ditch. It was the place of punishment for pretended Alchemists, Coiners, Personators of other people, False Accusers, and Impostors of all such descriptions. They lay on one another in heaps, or attempted to crawl about—some itching madly with leprosies—some swollen and gasping with dropsies—some wetly reeking, like hands washed in winter-time. One was an alchemist of Sienna, a nation vainer than the French; another a Florentine, who tricked a man into making a wrong will; another, Sinon of Troy; another, Myrrha; another, the wife of Potiphar. Their miseries did not hinder them from giving one another malignant blows; and Dante was listening eagerly to an abusive conversation between Sinon and a Brescian coiner, when Virgil rebuked him for the disgraceful condescension, and said it was a pleasure fit only for vulgar minds.[39]

The blushing poet felt the reproof so deeply, that he could not speak for shame, though he manifested by his demeanour that he longed to do so, and thus obtained the pardon he despaired of. He says he felt like a man that, during an unhappy dream, wishes himself dreaming while he is so, and does not know it. Virgil understood his emotion, and, as Achilles did with his spear, healed the wound with the tongue that inflicted it.

A silence now ensued between the companions; for they had quitted Evil-budget, and arrived at the ninth great circle of hell, on the mound of which they passed along, looking quietly and steadily before them. Daylight had given place to twilight; and Dante was advancing his head a little, and endeavouring to discern objects in the distance, when his whole attention was called to one particular spot, by a blast of a horn so loud, that a thunder clap was a whisper in comparison. Orlando himself blew no such terrific blast, after the dolorous rout, when Charlemagne was defeated in his holy enterprise.[40] The poet raised his head, thinking he perceived a multitude of lofty towers. He asked Virgil to what region they belonged; but Virgil said, "Those are no towers: they are giants, standing each up to his middle in the pit that goes round this circle." Dante looked harder; and as objects clear up by little and little in the departing mist, he saw, with alarm, the tremendous giants that warred against Jove, standing half in and half out of the pit, like the towers that crowned the citadel of Monteseggione. The one whom he saw plainest, and who stood with his arms hanging down on each side, appeared to him to have a face as huge as the pinnacle of St. Peter's, and limbs throughout in proportion. The monster, as the pilgrims were going by, opened his dreadful mouth, fit for no sweeter psalmody, and called after them, in the words of some unknown tongue, Rafel, maee amech zabee almee.[41] "Dull wretch!" exclaimed Virgil, "keep to thine horn, and so vent better whatsoever frenzy or other passion stuff thee. Feel the chain round thy throat, thou confusion! See, what a clenching hoop is about thy gorge!" Then he said to Dante, "His howl is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he through whose evil ambition it was that mankind ceased to speak one language. Pass him, and say nothing; for every other tongue is to him, as his is to thee."

The companions went on for about the length of a sling's throw, when they passed the second giant, who was much fiercer and linger than Nimrod. He was fettered round and round with chains, that fixed one arm before him and the other behind him—Ephialtes his name, the same that would needs make trial of his strength against Jove himself. The hands which he then wielded were now motionless, but he shook with passion; and Dante thought he should have died for terror, the effect on the ground about him was so fearful. It surpassed that of a tower shaken by an earthquake. The poet expressed a wish to look at Briareus, but he was too far off. He saw, however, Antæus, who, not having fought against heaven, was neither tongue-confounded nor shackled; and Virgil requested the "taker of a thousand lions," by the fame which the living poet had it in his power to give him, to bear the travellers in his arms down the steep descent into this deeper portion of hell, which was the region of tormenting cold. Antmus, stooping, like the leaning tower of Bologna, to take them up, gathered them in his arms, and, depositing them in the gulf below, raised himself to depart like the mast of a ship.[42]

Had I hoarse and rugged words equal to my subject, says the poet, I would now make them fuller of expression, to suit the rocky horror of this hole of anguish; but I have not, and therefore approach it with fear, since it is no jesting enterprise to describe the depths of the universe, nor fit for a tongue that babbles of father and mother.[43] Let such of the Muses assist me as turned the words of Amphion into Theban walls; so shall the speech be not too far different from the matter.

Oh, ill-starred creatures! wretched beyond all others, to inhabit a place so hard to speak of—better had ye been sheep or goats.

The poet was beginning to walk with his guide along the place in which the giant had set them down, and was still looking up at the height from which he had descended, when a voice close to him said, "Have a care where thou treadest. Hurt not with thy feet the heads of thy unhappy brethren."

Dante looked down and before him, and saw that he was walking on a lake of ice, in which were Murderous Traitors up to their chins, their teeth chattering, their faces held down, their eyes locked up frozen with tears. Dante saw two at his feet so closely stuck together, that the very hairs of their heads were mingled. He asked them who they were, and as they lifted up their heads for astonishment, and felt the cold doubly congeal them, they dashed their heads against one another for hate and fury. They were two brothers who had murdered each other.[44] Near them were other Tuscans, one of whom the cold had deprived of his ears; and thousands more were seen grinning like dogs, for the pain.

Dante, as he went along, kicked the face of one of them, whether by chance, or fate, or will,[45] he could not say. The sufferer burst into tears, and cried out, "Wherefore dost thou torment me? Art thou come to revenge the defeat at Montaperto?" The pilgrim at this question felt eager to know who he was; but the unhappy wretch would not tell. His countryman seized him by the hair to force him; but still he said he would not tell, were he to be scalped a thousand times. Dante, upon this, began plucking up his hairs by the roots, the man barking,[46] with his eyes squeezed up, at every pull; when another soul exclaimed, "Why, Bocca, what the devil ails thee? Must thou needs bark for cold as well as chatter?" [47]

"Now, accursed traitor, betrayer of thy country's standard," said Dante, "be dumb if thou wilt; for I shall tell thy name to the world."

"Tell and begone!" said Bocca; "but carry the name of this babbler with thee; 'tis Buoso, who left the pass open to the enemy between Piedmont and Parma; and near him is the traitor for the pope, Beccaria; and Ganellone, who betrayed Charlemagne; and Tribaldello, who opened Faenza to the enemy at night-time."

The pilgrims went on, and beheld two other spirits so closely locked up together in one hole of the ice, that the head of one was right over the other's, like a cowl; and Dante, to his horror, saw that the upper head was devouring the lower with all the eagerness of a man who is famished. The poet asked what could possibly make him skew a hate so brutal; adding, that if there were any ground for it, he would tell the story to the world.[48]

The sinner raised his head from the dire repast, and after wiping his jaws with the hair of it, said, "You ask a thing which it shakes me to the heart to think of. It is a story to renew all my misery. But since it will produce this wretch his due infamy, hear it, and you shall see me speak and weep at the same time. How thou tamest hither I know not; but I perceive by thy speech that thou art Florentine.

"Learn, then, that I was the Count Ugolino, and this man was Ruggieri the Archbishop. How I trusted him, and was betrayed into prison, there is no need to relate; but of his treatment of me there, and how cruel a death I underwent, bear; and then judge if he has offended me.

"I had been imprisoned with my children a long time in the tower which has since been called from me the Tower of Famine; and many a new moon had I seen through the hole that served us for a window, when I dreamt a dream that foreshadowed to me what was coming. Methought that this man headed a great chase against the wolf, in the mountains between Pisa and Lucca. Among the foremost in his party were Gualandi, Sismondi, and Lanfranchi, and the hounds were thin and eager, and high-bred; and in a little while I saw the hounds fasten on the flanks of the wolf and the wolf's children, and tear them. At that moment I awoke with the voices of my own children in my ears, asking for bread. Truly cruel must thou be, if thy heart does not ache to think of what I thought then. If thou feel not for a pang like that, what is it for which thou art accustomed to feel? We were now all awake; and the time was at hand when they brought us bread, and we had all dreamt dreams which made us anxious. At that moment I heard the key of the horrible tower turn in the lock of the door below, and fasten it. I looked at my children, and said not a word. I did not weep. I made a strong effort upon the soul within me. But my little Anselm said, 'Father, why do you look so? Is any thing the matter?' Nevertheless I did not weep, nor say a word all the day, nor the night that followed. In the morning a ray of light fell upon us through the window of our sad prison, and I beheld in those four little faces the likeness of my own face, and then I began to gnaw my hands for misery. My children, thinking I did it for hunger, raised themselves on the floor, and said, 'Father, we should be less miserable if you would eat our own flesh. It was you that gave it us. Take it again.' Then I sat still, in order not to make them unhappier: and that day and the next we all remained without speaking. On the fourth day, Gaddo stretched himself at my feet, and said, 'Father, why won't you help me?' and there he died. And as surely as thou lookest on me, so surely I beheld the whole three die in the same manner. So I began in my misery to grope about in the dark for them, for I had become blind; and three days I kept calling on them by name, though they were dead; till famine did for me what grief had been unable to do."

With these words, the miserable man, his eyes starting from his head, seized that other wretch again with his teeth, and ground them against the skull as a dog does with a bone.

O Pisa! scandal of the nations! since thy neighbours are so slow to punish thee, may the very islands tear themselves up from their roots in the sea, and come and block up the mouth of thy river, and drown every soul within thee. What if this Count Ugolino did, as report says he did, betray thy castles to the enemy? his children had not betrayed them; nor ought they to have been put to an agony like this. Their age was their innocence; and their deaths have given thee the infamy of a second Thebes.[49]

The pilgrims passed on, and beheld other traitors frozen up in swathes of ice, with their heads upside down. Their very tears had hindered them from shedding more; for their eyes were encrusted with the first they shed, so as to be enclosed with them as in a crystal visor, which forced back the others into an accumulation of anguish. One of the sufferers begged Dante to relieve him of this ice, in order that he might vent a little of the burden which it repressed. The poet said he would do so, provided he would disclose who he was. The man said he was the friar Alberigo, who invited some of his brotherhood to a banquet in order to slay them.

"What!" exclaimed Dante, "art thou no longer, then, among the living?"

"Perhaps I appear to be," answered the friar; "for the moment any one commits a treachery like mine, his soul gives up his body to a demon, who thenceforward inhabits it in the man's likeness. Thou knowest Branca Doria, who murdered his father-in-law, Zanche? He seems to be walking the earth still, and yet he has been in this place many years." [50]