him as 66 101. The greyhound is Can Grande colour he means; because no clear stream or lake on the Continent ever looks brown, but blue or green; and Dante, by merely taking away the pleasant colour, would get at once to this idea of grave clear gray. So, when he was talking of twilight, his eye for colour was far too good to let him call it brown in our sense. Twilight is not brown, but purple, golden, or dark gray; and this last was what Dante meant. Farther, I find that this negation of colour is always the means by which Dante subdues his tones. Thus the fatal inscription on the Hades gate is written in 'obscure colour,' and the air which torments the passionate spirits is aer nero,' black air (Inf. v. 51), called presently afterwards (line 81) malignant air, just as the gray cliffs are called malignant cliffs." aella Scala, Lord of Verona, Imperial 116. I give preference to the read- "In describing a simple twilight-not a Hades twilight, but an ordinarily fair evening-(Inf. ii. 1), he says, the 'brown' air took the animals away from their fatigues; the waves under Charon's boat are brown' (Inf. iii. 117); and Lethe, which is perfectly clear and yet dark, as with oblivion, is bruna-bruna,' brown, exceeding brown.' Now, clearly in all these cases no warmth is meant to be mingled in the colour. Dante had never seen one of our bog-streams, with its porter-coloured foam; and there can be no doubt that, in calling Lethe brown, he means that it was dark slate-gray, inclining to black; as, for instance, our clear Cumberland lakes, which, looked straight down upon where they are deep, seem to be lakes of ink. I am sure this is the 13. Æneas, founder of the Roman Empire. Virgil, Eneid, B. VI. 24. "That is," says Boccaccio, Comento, "St. Peter the Apostle, called the greater on account of his papal dignity, and to distinguish him from many other holy men of the same name. 28. St. Paul. Acts, ix. 15: "He is a chosen vessel unto me." Also 2 Corinthians, xii. 3, 4: “And I knew such a man, whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell; God knoweth ; how that he was caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter." 42. Shakespeare, Macheth, IV. 1: "The flighty purpose never is o'ertook, Unless the deed go with it." 52. Suspended in Limbo; neither in pain nor in glory. 55. Brighter than the star; than "that star which is brightest," comments Boccaccio. Others say the Sun, and refer to Dante's Canzone, beginning: "The star of beauty which doth measure time, 67. This passage will recall Minerva transmitting the message of Juno to Achilles, Iliad, II.: "Go thou forthwith to the army of the Achæans, and hesi tate not; but restrain each man with thy persuasive words, nor suffer them to drag to the sea their double-oared ships.". 70. Beatrice Portinari, Dante's first love, the inspiration of his song, and in his mind the symbol of the Divine. He says of her in the Vita Nuova :-" This most gentle lady, of whom there has been discourse in what precedes, reached such favour among the people, that when she passed along the way persons ran to see her, which gave me wonderful delight. And when she was near any one, such modesty took possession of his heart, that he did not dare to raise his eyes or to return her salutation; and to this, should any one doubt it, many, as having experienced it, could bear witness for me. She, crowned and clothed with humility, took her way, displaying no pride in that which she saw and heard. Many, when she had passed, said, 'This is not a woman, rather is she one of the most beautiful angels of heaven.' Others said, 'She is a miracle. Blessed be the Lord who can perform such a marvel.' I say, that she showed herself so gentle and so full of all beauties, that those who looked on her felt within themselves a pure and sweet delight, such as they could not tell in words."-C. E. Norton, The New Life, 51, 52. 78. The heaven of the moon, which contains or encircles the earth. 84. The ampler circles of Paradise. 94. Divine Mercy. 97. St. Lucia, emblem of enlightening Grace. 102. Rachel, emblem of Divine Contemplation. See Par. XXXII. 9. 108. Beside that flood, where ocean has no vaunt; "That is," says Boccaccio, Comento," the sea cannot boast of being more impetuous or more dangerous than that." 127. This simile has been imitated by Chaucer, Spenser, and many more. Jeremy Taylor says: "So have I seen the sun kiss the frozen earth, which was bound up with the images of death, and the colder breath of the north; and then the waters break from their enclosures, and melt with joy and run in useful channels; and the flies do rise again from their little graves in walls, and dance awhile in the air, to tell that there is joy within, and that the great mother of creatures will open the stock of her new refreshment, become useful to mankind, and sing praises to her Redeemer." Rossetti, Spirito Antipapale del Secolo di Dante, translated by Miss Ward, II. 216, makes this political application of the lines: "The Florentines, called Sons of Flora, are compared to flowers; and Dante calls the two parties who divided the city white and black flowers, and himself white-flower,-the name by which he was called by many. Now he makes use of a very abstruse comparison, to express how he became, from a Guelph or Black, a Ghibelline or White. He describes himself as a flower, first bent and closed by the night frosts, and then blanched or whitened by the sun (the symbol of reason), which opens its leaves; and what produces the effect of the sun on him is a speech of Virgil's, persuading him to follow his guidance.' CANTO III. I. This canto begins with a repetition of sounds like the tolling of a funeral bell: dolente. . . dolore! Ruskin, Modern Painters, III. 215, speaking of the Inferno, says: "Milton's effort, in all that he tells us of his Inferno, is to make it indefinite; Dante's, to make it definite. Both, indeed, describe it as entered through gates; but, within the gate, all is wild and fenceless with Milton, having indeed its four rivers, -the last vestige of the mediæval tradition, but rivers which flow through a waste of mountain and moorland, and by many a frozen, many a fiery Alp.' But Dante's Inferno is accurately separated into circles drawn with well-pointed compasses; mapped and properly surveyed in every direc tion, trenched in a thoroughly good style of engineering from depth to depth, and divided, in the accurate middle' (dritto mezzo) of its deepest abyss, into a concentric series of ten moats and embankments, like those about a castle, with bridges from each embankment to the next; precisely in the manner of those bridges over Hiddekel and Euphrates, which Mr. Macaulay thinks so innocently designed, apparently not aware that he is also laughing at Dante. These larger fosses are of rock, and the bridges also; but as he goes further into detail, Dante tells us of various minor fosses and embankments, in which he anxiously points out to us not only the formality, but the neatness and perfectness, of the stonework. For instance, in describing the river Phlegethon, he tells us that it was 'paved with stone at the bottom, and at the sides, and over the edges of the sides,' just as the water is at the baths of Bulicame; and for fear we should think this embankment at all larger than it really was, Dante adds, carefully, that it was made just like the embankments of Ghent or Bruges against the sea, or those in Lombardy which bank the Brenta, only not so high, nor so wide,' as any of these. And besides the trenches, we have two well-built castles; one like Ecbatana, with seven circuits of wall (and surrounded by a fair stream), wherein the great poets and sages of antiquity live; and another, a great fortified city with walls of iron, red-hot, and a deep fosse round it, and full of grave citizens,'-the city of Dis. words, the knowledge of God is intel lectual good. "It is a most just punishment," says St. Augustine, that man should lose that freedom which man could not use, yet had power to keep if he would, and that he who had knowledge to do what was right, and did not do it, should be deprived of the knowledge of what was right; and that he who would not do righteously, when he had the power, should lose the power to do it when he had the will." 22. The description given of the Mouth of Hell by Frate Alberico, Visio, 9, is in the grotesque spirit of the Medieval Mysteries. "After all these things, I was led to the Tartarean Regions, and to the mouth of the Infernal Pit, which seemed like unto a well; regions full of horrid darkness, of fetid exhalations, of shrieks and loud howlings. Near this Hell there was a Worm of immeasurable size, bound with a huge chain, one end of which seemed to be fastened in Hell. Before the mouth of this Hell there stood a great multitude of souls, which he absorbed at once, as if they were flies; so that, drawing in his breath, he swallowed them all together; then, breathing, exhaled them all on fire, like sparks. 36. The reader will here be reminded of Bunyan's town of Fairspeech. "Christian. Pray who are your kindred there, if a man may be so bold? 66 "Now, whether this be in what we moderns call 'good taste,' or not, I do not mean just now to inquire, Dante | having nothing to do with taste, but with the facts of what he had seen; only, so far as the imaginative faculty of the two poets is concerned, note that Milton's vagueness is not the sign of imagination, but of its absence, so far as it is significative in the matter. For it does not follow, because Milton did not map out his Inferno as Dante did, that he could not have done so if he had chosen; only it was the easier and less imaginative process to leave it vague than to define it. Imagination is always the seeing and asserting faculty; that which obscures or conceals may be judgment, "There Christian stepped a little or feeling, but not invention. The in-aside to his fellow Hopeful, saying, vention, whether good or bad, is in theIt runs in my mind that this is one accurate engineering, not in the fog and By-ends of Fair-speech; and if it be uncertainty. he, we have as very a knave in our company as dwelleth in all these parts.' 18. Aristotle says: "The good of the intellect is the highest beatitude;" and Dante in the Convito: "The True is the good of the intellect." In other 'By-ends. Almost the whole town; and in particular my Lord Turnabout, my Lord Timeserver, my Lord Fairspeech, from whose ancestors that town first took its name; also Mr. Smoothman, Mr. Facing-both-ways, Mr. Anything, and the parson of our parish, Mr. Two-tongues, was my mother's own brother by father's side 42. Many commentators and trans. lators interpret alcuna in its usual signifį. an idiotic man, he took counsel with Messer Benedetto aforesaid, as to the best method of resigning." Celestine having relinquished the papal office, this "Messer Benedetto aforesaid" was elected Pope, under the title of Boniface VIII. His greatest misfortune was that he had Dante for an adversary. cation of some: "For some glory the damned would have from them." This would be a reason why these pusillanimous ghosts should not be sent into the profounder abyss, but no reason why they should not be received there. This is strengthened by what comes afterwards, 1. 63. These souls were "hateful to God, and to his enemies." They were not good enough for Heaven, nor Gower gives this legend of Pope Cobad enough for Hell. "So then, be-lestine in his Confessio Amantis, Book II., cause thou art lukewarm, and neither as an example of "the vice of supplantacold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my cion." He says :mouth." Revelation iii. 16. Macchiavelli represents this scorn of inefficient mediocrity in an epigram on Peter Soderini : 66 'The night that Peter Soderini died He at the mouth of Hell himself presented. Go to the babies' Limbo!' Pluto cried." The same idea is intensified in the old ballad of Carle of Kelly-Burn Brees, Cromek, p. 37 :- "She's nae fit for heaven, an' she'll ruin a' hell." 52. This restless flag is an emblem of the shifting and unstable minds of its followers. 59. Generally supposed to be Pope Celestine V. whose great refusal, or abdication, of the papal office is thus described by Boccaccio in his Comento : 66 "This clerk, when he hath herd the form, Milman, Hist. Latin Christianity, VI. 194, speaks thus upon the subject : "The abdication of Celestine V. was an event unprecedented in the annals of the Church, and jarred harshly against some of the first principles of the Papal authority. It was a confession of com mon humanity, of weakness below the ordinary standard of men in him whom the Conclave, with more than usual certitude, as guided by the special interBeing a simple man and of a holy position of the Holy Ghost, had raised life, living as a hermit in the moun- to the spiritual throne of the world. tains of Morrone in Abruzzo, above Sel- The Conclave had been, as it seemed, mona, he was elected Pope in Perugia either under an illusion as to this deafter the death of Pope Nicola d'As-clared manifestation of the Holy Spirit, coli; and his name being Peter, he was called Celestine. Considering his simplicity, Cardinal Messer Benedetto Gatano, a very cunning man, of great courage and desirous of being Pope, managing astutely, began to show him that he held this high office much to the prejudice of his own soul, inasmuch as he did not feel himself competent for it;-others pretend that he contrived with some private servants of his to have voices heard in the chamber of the aforesaid Pope, which, as if they were voices of angels sent from heaven, said, 'Resign, Celestine! Resign, Celestine!'--moved by which, and being | or had been permitted to deceive itself. Nor was there less incongruity in a Pope, whose office invested him in something at least approaching to in fallibility, acknowledging before the world his utter incapacity, his undeni able fallibility. That idea, formed out of many conflicting conceptions, yet forcibly harmonized by long traditionary reverence, of unerring wisdom, oracular truth, authority which it was sinful to question or limit, was strangely disturbed and confused, not as before by too overweening ambition, or even awful yet still unacknowledged crime, but by avowed weakness, bordering on imbeci F 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 srring and passionate soul of the great Jorentine, has been feebly counterted, if counteracted, by the praise of trarch in his declamation on the eauty of a solitary life, for which the rist 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 naturally compelled or tempted to sume an uncongenial dignity. It was 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. 91 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 them 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., I, 4: "I passed, methought, the melancholy flood With that grim ferryman which poets write of, Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.' "This sensible warm motion to become 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, blame Dante for mingling together things Pagan and Christian. But they should remember how through all the Middle Ages human thought was wrestling with the old traditions; how many Pagan observances passed into Christianity in those early days; what reverence Dante had for Virgil and the classics; and how |