lity. His profound piety hardly reconciled the confusion. A saint after all made but a bad Pope.

"It was viewed, in his own time, in a different light by different minds. The monkish writers held it up as the most noble example of monastic, of Christian perfection. Admirable as was his election, his abdication was even more to be admired. It was an example of humility stupendous to all, imitable by few. The divine approval was said to be shown by a miracle which followed directly on his resignation; but the scorn of man has been expressed by the undying verse of Dante, who condemned him who who was guilty of the baseness of the 'great refusal' to that circle of hell where are those disdained alike by mercy and justice, on whom the poet will not condescend to look. This sentence, so accordant with the stirring and passionate soul of the great Florentine, has been feebly counteracted, if counteracted, by the praise of l'etrarch in his declamation on the beauty of a solitary life, for which the lyrist professed a somewhat hollow and poetic admiration. Assuredly there was no magnanimity contemptuous of the Papal greatness in the abdication of Celestine; it was the weariness, the conscious inefficiency, the regret of a man suddenly wrenched away from all his habits, pursuits, and avocations, and unnaturally compelled or tempted to assume an uncongenial dignity. It was the cry of passionate feebleness to be released from an insupportable burden. Compassion is the highest emotion of sympathy which it would have desired or could deserve."

75. Spenser's "misty dampe of misconceyving night."

82. Virgil, Æneid, VI., Davidson's translation

:

"A grim ferryman guards these floods and rivers, Charon, of frightful slovenliness; on whose chin a load of gray hair neglected lies; his eyes are flame: his vestments hang from his shoulders by a knot, with filth overgrown. Himself thrusts on the barge with a pole, and tends the sails, and wafts over the bodies in his iron-coloured boat, now in years: but the god is of fresh and green

old age. Hither the whole tribe ir swarms come pouring to the banks, matrons and men, the souls of magnanimous heroes who had gone through life, boys and unmarried maids, and young men who had been stretched on the fune ral pile before the eyes of their parents; as numerous as withered leaves fall in the woods with the first cold of autumn, or as numerous as birds flock to the land from deep ocean, when the chilling year drives them beyond sea, and sends ther to sunny climes. They stood praying to cross the flood the first, and were stretching forth their hands with fond desire to gain the further bank but the sullen boatman admits sometimes these, sometimes those; while others to a great distance removed, he debars from the banks."

And Shakespeare, Richard III., 1. 4:

"I passed, methought, the melancholy flood With that grim ferryman which poets write of, Unto the kingdom of perpetual night."

87. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, III., 1 :

"This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling."

89. Virgil, Eneid, VI.: "This is the region of Ghosts, of Sleep and drowsy Night; to waft over the bodies of the living in my Stygian boat is not permitted.'

93. The souls that were to be saved assembled at the mouth of the Tiber, where they were received by the celestial pilot, or ferryman, who transported them to the shores of Purgatory, as described in Purg. II.

94. Many critics, and foremost among them Padre Pompeo Venturi, blare Dante for mingling together things Pa gan and Christian. But they should remember how through all the Middle Ages human thought was wrestling with the old traditions; how many Pagu observances passed into Christianity those early days; what reverence Dine had for Virgil and the classics; and how

many Christian nations still preserve some traces of Paganism in the names of the stars, the months, and the days. Padre Pompeo should not have forgotten that he, though a Christian, bore a Pagan name. which perhaps is as evidenta brutto miscuglio in a learned Jesuit, as any which he has pointed out in Dante.

Upon him and other commentators of the Divine Poem, a very amusing chapter might be written. While the great Comedy is going on upon the scene above, with all its pomp and music, these critics in the pit keep up such a perpetual wrangling among themselves, as seriously to disturb the performance. Biagioli is the most violent of all, particularly against Venturi, whom he calls an "infamous dirty dog," sozzo can vituperate, an epithet hardly permissible in the most heated literary controversy, Whereupon in return Zani de' Ferranti calls Biagioli "an inurbane grammarian,' and a "most ungrateful ingrate,"-quel grammatico inurbano . . . ingrato in gratissimo.

Any one who is desirous of tracing out the presence of Paganism in Christianity will find the subject amply discussed by Middleton in his Letter from Rome.

109. Dryden's Aeneis, B. VI. :—

eyes

"His 112. Homer, Iliad, VI.: "As is the race of leaves, such is that of men; some leaves the wind scatters upon the ground, and others the budding wood produces, for they come again in the season of Spring. So is the race of men, one springs up and the other dies,"

like hollow furnaces on fire."

See also Note 82 of this canto. Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III. 160, says :

"When Dante describes the spirits Calling from the bank of Acheron as dead leaves flutter from a bough,' he gives the most perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an instant losing His own clear perception that these are souls, and those are leaves: he makes no Confusion of one with the other."

Shelley in his Ode to the West Wind

inverts this image, and compares the dead leaves to ghosts :

"O wild West Wind! thou breath of Autumn's being!

Thou from whose presence the leaves dead Are driven like ghosts, from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes."

CANTO IV.

. I. Dante is borne across the river Acheron in his sleep, he does not tell us how, and awakes on the brink of "the dolorous valley of the abyss." He now enters the First Circle of the Inferno; the Limbo of the Unbaptized, the border land, as the name denotes.

Frate Alberico in § 2 of his Vision says, that the divine punishments are tempered to extreme youth and old

age.

"Man is first a little child, then grows and reaches adolescence, and attains to youthful vigour; and, little by little growing weaker, declines into old age; and at every step of life the sum of his sins increases. So likewise the little children are punished least, and more and more the adolescents and the youths; until, their sins decreasing with the longcontinued torments, punishment also begins to decrease, as if by a kind of old age (veluti quadam senectute).”

10. Frate Alberico, in § 9: "The darkness was so dense and impenetrable that it was impossible to see anything there."

28. Mental, not physical pain; what the French theologians call la peine du dam, the privation of the sight of God. 30. Virgil, Æneid, VI. : "Forthwith are heard voices, loud wailings, and weeping ghosts of infants, in the first opening of the gate; whom, bereaved of sweet life out of the course of nature, and snatched from the breast, a black day cut off, and buried in an untimely grave."

53. The descent of Christ into Limbo. Neither here nor elsewhere in the Inferno does Dante mention the name of Christ.

72. The reader will not fail to ob serve how Dante makes the word honour, in its various forms, ring and reverberate

through these lines,-orrevol, onori, orranza, onrata, onorata!

86. Dante puts the sword into the hand of Homer as a symbol of his warlike epic, which is a Song of the Sword. 93. Upon this line Boccaccio, Comento, says: "A proper thing it is to honour every man, but especially those who are of one and the same profession, as these were with Virgil."

100. Another assertion of Dante's consciousness of his own power as a poet. 106. This is the Noble Castle of human wit and learning, encircled with its seven scholastic walls, the Trivium, Logic, Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Quadrivium, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry, Music.

The fair rivulet is Eloquence, which Dante does not seem to consider a very profound matter, as he and Virgil pass over it as if it were dry ground.

118. Of this word "enamel " Mr. Ruskin, Modern Fainters, III. 227, remarks:

"The first instance I know of its right use, though very probably it had been so employed before, is in Dante. The righteous spirits of the pre-Christian ages are seen by him, though in the Inferno, yet in a place open, luminous and high, walking upon the 'green enamel.'

"I am very sure that Dante did not use this phrase as we use it. He knew well what enamel was; and his readers, in order to understand him thoroughly, must remember what it is, -a vitreous paste, dissolved in water, mixed with metallic oxides, to give it the opacity and the colour required, spread in a moist state on metal, and afterwards hardened by fire, so as never to change. And Dante means, in using this metaphor of the grass of the Inferno, to mark that it is laid as a tempering and cooling substance over the dark, metallic, gloomy ground; but yet so hardened by the fire, that it is not any more fresh or living grass, but a smooth, silent, lifeless bed

of eternal green. And we know how

hard Dante's idea of it was; because afterwards, in what is perhaps the most awful passage of the whole Inferno, when the three furies rise at the top of the burning tower, and, catching sight

"Or va mastro Brunetto
Per lo cammino stretto,
Cercando di vedere,

E toccare, e sapere
Ciò, che gli è destinato.
E non fui guari andato,
Ch' i' fui nella diserta,
Dov'i' non trovai certa
Nè strada, nè sentiero.
Deh che paese fero
Trovai in quelle parti!
Che s' io sapessi d'arti
Quivi mi bisognava,

Chè quanto più mirava,
Più mi parea selvaggio.
Quivi non ha viaggio,
Quivi non ha persone,

Quivi non ha magione,
Non bestia, non uccello,
Non fiume, non ruscello,
Non formica, nè mosca,

Nè cosa, ch'i' conosca.
E io pensando forte,

Dottai ben della morte.
E non è maraviglia;
Chè ben trecento miglia
Girava d' ogni lato

Quel paese snagiato.
Ma si m' assicurai
Quando mi ricordai
Del sicuro segnale,

Che contra tutto male
Mi dà securamento:
E io presi ardimento,
Quasi per avventura

Per una valle scura,
Tanto, ch' al terzo giorno
I mi trovai d' intorno
Un grande pian giocondo,
Lo più gaio del mondo,
E lo più dilettoso.

Ma ricontar non oso
Ciò, ch' io trovai, e vidi,
Se Dio mi guardi, e guidi
Io non sarei creduto
Di ciò, ch' ' ho veduto;
Ch'i' vidi Imperadori,

E Re, e gran signori,
E mastri di scienze,

Che dittavan sentenze;
E vidi tante cose,

Che già 'n rime, nè 'n prose
Non le poria ritrare.

129. The Saladin of the Crusades. See Gibbon, Chap. LIX. Dante also makes mention of him, as worthy of affectionate remembrance, in the Convito, IV. 2. Mr. Cary quotes the following passage from Knolles's History of the Turks, page 57

"About this time (1193) died the great Sultan Saladin, the greatest terror of the Christians, who, mindful of man's fragility and the vanity of worldly honours, commanded at the time of his death no solemnity to be used at his burial, but only his shirt, in manner of an ensign, made fast unto the point of a lance, to be carried before his dead body as an ensign, a plain priest going before, and crying aloud unto the people in this sort, Saladin, Conqueror of the East, of all the greatness and riches he had in his life, carrieth not with him anything more than his shirt.' A sight worthy so great a king, as wanted nothing to his eternal commendation more than the true knowledge of his salvation in Christ Jesus. He reigned about sixteen years with great honour."

The following story of Saladin is from the Cento Novelle Antiche. coe's Italian Novelists, I. 18 :

Ros

"On another occasion the great Saladin, in the career of victory, proclaimed a truce between the Christian armics and his own. During this interval he visited the camp and the cities belonging to his enemies, with the design, should he approve of the customs and manners of the people, of embracing the Christian faith. He observed their tables spread with the finest damask coverings ready prepared for the feast, and he praised their magnificence. On entering the tents of the king of

"Afterwards, several of the Christian leaders returned with the Sultan to observe the manners of the Saracens. They appeared much shocked on seeing all ranks of people take their meals sitting upon the ground. The Sultan led them into a grand pavilion where he feasted his court, surrounded with the most beautiful tapestries, and rich foot-cloths, on which were wrought large embroidered figures of the cross. The Christian chiefs trampled them under their feet with the utmost indifference, and even rubbed their boots, and spat upon them.

:

"On perceiving this, the Sultan turned towards them in the greatest anger, exclaiming And do you who pretend to preach the cross treat it thus ignominiously? Gentlemen, I am shocked at your conduct. Am I to suppose from this that the worship of your Deity consists only in words, not in actions? Neither your manners nor your conduct please me.' And on this he dismissed them, breaking off the truce and commencing hostilities more warmly than before."

143. Avicenna, an Arabian physician of Ispahan in the eleventh century. Born 980, died 1036.

144. Averrhoës, an Arabian scholar of the twelfth century, who translated the works of Aristotle, and wrote a commentary upon them. He was born in Cordova in 1149, and died in Morocco, about 1200. He was the head of the Western School of philosophy, as Avicenna was of the Eastern.

CANTO V.

In the Second Circle are found the