into error, maybe, by his passions, or by the passions of his age; but unshaken in his stern independence, in his unswerving consistency.

The presence of a great criminal, or the recital of any startling enormity leads him to inveigh against a whole city, against a whole people, against all mankind, with an outburst of indiscriminate indignation; a too close adherence to his social principles makes him visit with the most severe censure, deeds, virtuous in themselves, honest in the motives that dictated them, but fatal in their results upon the cause of humanity; but no instance occurs of indulgence in personal feeling.

As a warrior, as a citizen, as a magistrate at home, as a lonely and destitute wanderer abroad-as a ruler over a riotous multitude, as a sullen and ungracious courtier in the palace of the great, he was invariably actuated by the same strict conscience of duty, which set him at variance with all existing parties, hastened his downfall at Florence, and aggravated the desolation of his friendless exile. And it was this same keen sense of right, this fast tenacity of opinion, which rendered him bigoted and intolerant, though it may be proved that, even in the hottest ebullition of his withering disdain, the principle, not the person, was the object of his enmity. The Florentine magistrates who signed the iniquitous sentence of his banishment, as well as other relentless persecutors, never obtained the honour of the most passing allusion in that book where no one was forgotten; and Pope Boniface VIII., himself, to whom the poet justly referred all his public and private grievances, becomes sacred in his eyes the moment the agents of Philip of France lay their hands on his inviolable person-a sacrilege which the pious Catholic stigmatised as tantamount to a re-crucifixion of Christ. So much for Dante's bigotries and personal rancours.

Thus in his age of premature decline, when hope withering after hope, he receded from active struggle, and renounced the expectation of hastening by his own hand the maturity of his momentous designs-when at war with his own generation he drew his cloak around him, and shunned the contaminating intercourse of men-he resolved to refer his own and the world's cause to the judgment of posterity, and to bequeath to a more righteous race the treasure of his redeeming ideas-he determined to write.

VI.

WORKING OF Dante's MIND.

FROM his earliest childhood, a deep, an ardent votary of knowledge drawing from the fresh-flowing sources of science with all the idolatrous enthusiasm of a Cimmerian for a new-dawning light, Dante had, as it were, multiplied his existence, to reconcile the genial enjoyments of contemplative life with the arduous duties of his public career. As a poet and a scholar he had already no equal when he only sought rest and relaxation in his intellectual pursuits.

But henceforth his learning must become an instrument-his genius a weapon. His song shall go forth as the word among the latest generations.

He sought, then, a subject as unlimited as his own powers-a worldembracing theme, to which no topic could be extraneous; by a daring abstraction he aspired to fathom the infinite.

Sore beset with the misunderstandings and disappointments of this life,

he looked for redress and justification in another. Dante sought out another world—a world of his own, in which the one he had so long been worried in, should be judged and sentenced.

The ideas of mankind were in those dark ages perpetually revolving upon that life beyond life, which the omnipresent religion of that fanatical age loved to people with appalling phantoms and harrowing terrors. Dante determined to anticipate his final doom, and, still in the flesh, to break through the threshold of eternity and explore the kingdom of death.

He would "sweep adown the gulf of time," sound the great mystery of the hidden world, lay it bare to the gaze of terrified mortals, and startle the earth with the awful tidings of Heaven and Hell.

A minister of retributive justice, he would visit the shades of men anciently or recently departed; he would unmask hypocrisy and restore crushed innocence, chastise arrogance and assuage sorrow, mediate between the helpless dead and the oblivious survivor; above all, reveal the annals of the fast-fading past, and turn its teeming records into a severe lesson for the present, into a threatening warning for the future.

The meeting of illustrious dead, whose very sight would ever after "exalt him in his own conceit," the interview with lately departed, longlamented friends, whose undying love would soothe the wounds of his sensitive heart, the exultation of the righteous, the confusion of the reprobate, the impartial dealing of God's eternal justice, which would reconcile him to the temporary prevalence of human iniquity-all throughout his unearthly progress enabled him to indulge in a ceaseless outpouring of his over-wrought feelings.

His political theories respecting the equitable distribution of secular and spiritual powers, his views of a total reformation of Church and State, on which the destinies of his ill-fated country so virtually depended -his cosmographic notion of earth and firmament-his conjectures as to the essence, the attributes, and the eternal activity of the Deity-all his opinions, the result of deep thought and unwearied research, should now receive the sanction of super-human testimony. His doctrines should flow from the unerring lips of ancient sages, of the apostles and doctors of the church. The most abstruse problems should find a solution; the most controverted truths should be tested by the arguments of heavenly doctrine, in that transparent etherial region where is the end of all doubt. Angels and saints should now become his authority.

And Dante, be it remembered, had his own saint in Heaven, a guardian saint praying for, watching over him. Beatrice, the love-dream of his childhood-the vaguely worshipped idol of his untried heart-the sacred torch of truth and virtue treasured up in his bosom with the pious vigilance of a vestal-Beatrice, now guiding his star, the fairest flower of Paradise, the purest angel of God.

That same Beatrice allegorically invested with the sublime character of divine knowledge, commiserating the grievous errors of her ancient adorer, led astray by the violence of earthly passions, bewildered by the din of political factions, will now solicit from the eternal court permission to escort her beloved into Heaven. She will be his Mentor and teacher as soon as the Latin poet, Virgil-also an allegorical character personifying human reason-shall have led him through the circles of the gulf of darkness and up the steps of Purgatory-as soon as purified of human

frailty, and freed from mortal error, as soon as regenerated by immersion in the waters of oblivion, he shall be worthy to gaze upon her beaming countenance, and to steal one of her looks from the entrancing contemplation of the beatific vision.

VII.

HELL.

No poet ever struck upon a subject to which every fibre in the heart of his contemporaries more readily responded than Dante, when he undertook to write his Universal Gazetteer of the kingdom of death,-his hand-book for travellers to Heaven and Hell.

Soldiers and priests, in modern times, alternately govern the world. A peal of the organ is antiphonal to a flourish of trumpets. To an age of brawling and blustering, a period of fasting and psalm-singing succeedsa palmy era of tract societies and evangelical alliances. A procession of monks treads on the footsteps of invading hosts. Abbeys rise on battlefields, and cowled or surpliced foxes snatch up the prey for which lions and tigers are bleeding to death.

But in the age of Dante praying and fighting went side by side. The ark of the covenant rose in the midst of martial encampments. The priesthood of Christ gloried in the name of church-militant. The bishop said mass in his coat-of-arms, and rival fraternities knocked each other down with their crucifixes. The whole system of faith and worship was made to fit an age of outrage and violence. Christianity ruled by terror. Religion was then indeed the fear of God. Fear of the devil had been a more appropriate expression. Human laws had no hold on the guilty besides the gallows. The gospel had no argument stronger than Hell.

Consequently, priests and friars did not fail to make the most of that awful bugbear. Souls in temporary or in everlasting penance, met the sinner at every corner of the streets: hideous daubs on the walls, dismal carvings on the doors. Such bristling hair, such staring eyes as might haunt the most unimaginative man throughout life, and startle him from his slumbers. Their pangs and groans, their appalling curses were daily rehearsed on the pulpit.

The very games and sports of the people had something of a diabolical character. The Arno at Florence was often tricked out into a fancied representation of the bottomless pit. The populace on the bridge feasted on the half-grotesque, half-terrible drama, till the crazy structure sunk beneath the weight of the thronging multitude, and the gulf beneath, crammed with the dead and dying, presented in good earnest the scene it had been made to resemble in frolic.

The most immediate effect of this gloomy religion had been to turn almost all Europe into one vast monkery. Nor were friars, white, black, and grey, deemed sufficient; but the world teemed with lay fraternities without number, a set of amateur monks, a kind of militia and yeomanry, subsidiary to the regular host. The roads swarmed with long trains of pilgrims in white hoods, black hoods, sacks, shrouds, and other masquerade costumes in every variety, arousing the astounded population with the mad freaks of their noisy piety. Jubilees, revivals, all the worst revels of religion run mad, hand-in-hand with murder, arson, all the horrors of ceaseless, objectless war, anarchy, utter moral and social disorganisation. New relics brought forth every day to turn the tide of devotion.

The holy coat set up in opposition to the crown of thorns; the windingsheet puffed up to the disparagement of the swaddling-clothes. Holy images eternally turning up their eyes, eternally nodding their heads from their canvass, crucifixes slinking down from their crosses and roaming about like uneasy ghosts; Madonnas shifting their quarters across seas and mountains, with goods and chattels, like tortoises with their shells on their back.

Such was Catholicism for full ten centuries; such is it, to a great extent, even at the present day, in most parts of Italy; such it was especially in the age of Dante. The reformation of the militant orders, the proclamation of the first jubilee, the déménagement of the house of Loretto, the exhibition of the St. Veronica, and other momentous transactions and portents of the same nature, occurred within the brief period of Dante's career.

The bigotry and fanaticism of the age was, of course, proportionate to this display of ranting devotion. Fire and sword were never busier in the work of amputation and cauterisation of the rotten members of the church. Roasting of heretics, under the name of Paterini and Cathari, the Methodists and Puritans of the middle ages, had become, in the Lombard cities, an almost daily ceremony. In his hellish pictures, surely the poet needed no better models than such as priest-ridden society exhibited everywhere around him.

And Dante's stern genius was undoubtedly affected by the barbarism of his age, and imbibed with its ferocious spirit. Undertaken, as it was, with religious and political views, widely in advance of his benighted contemporaries, his work was, in its material parts, consonant with the wild notions prevailing around him. Dante's Hell is a monkish Hell in good earnest, with all its howling and gnashing of teeth. His demons are bonâ fide devils, long-horned, long-tailed, black as they ever were painted. Melted pitch and brimstone, serpents, dragons, fire, and ice, are the ingredients of the awful mess he sets before his readers. Nay more, all such horrors are served up with such a terrible earnestness, that any honest believer of those times could sup full of them, and labour with nightmares ever afterwards.

Mr. Leigh Hunt, and other modern critics, may justly object to so very hot and ungentlemanly a place of punishment; but Dante, it should be remembered, was either himself a true believer in the church of the thirteenth century, such as it was, or, knowing that he was writing for its votaries, blindly adopted the only language they were able to understand.

Το many of the followers of a more enlightened and rational Christianity, which has almost altogether shamed or laughed the devil out of countenance, the framework of Dante's Hell must certainly appear baroque and exaggerate. By the side of the proud and almost sublime Pluto of Tasso, and Satan of Milton, Dante's Alichinos and Farfarellos are poor devils, indeed.

Strange to say, and in conformity, perhaps, with the title of "Comedy," so quaintly prefixed to the poem, the "Inferno" has its humorous passages. Dante's devils are, some of them, droll fellows, who will crack their jokes with their victims, banter and argue with them; they are rude customers more often, blackguards up to the meanest tricks, the very fathers of lies. Spite of their frolics, however, and spite of their hideous grins, it is im

possible to mistake the tragic tone that pervades the poet's mind, all along its dolorous progress; among the vainest sports of his unruly fancy, no less than in its gloomiest inspiration, the oddity or wildness of conception is always set forth with terrible earnestness of diction. The powers of utterance are always in keeping with the depth and vastness of thought. There is a life-like palpableness in every object brought before us, which can be accounted for by nothing short of the actual evidence of the senses. 66 Verily, this man," as the old women at Verona observed, "has seen and touched the horrors he depicts." An eloquence impressive, efficient in the same measure as it disdains all attempts at effecta fancy that casts and moulds not-creates, and never stoops to mere description- - an inventiveness that fears no weariness, knows no exhaustion; startling, revolting, wringing our heart, rending it fibre from fibre-a phantasmagory of loathsome, dire suffering, never stopping at any climax of horror, of agony, but always seeking, "beyond the deepest hell a deeper still," till it revels on the misery of beings, "whose very tears choke up all utterance of woe, clustering on the lids from intense cold, and closing the outlet against the following heart-drops, which are thus driven inwards with unspeakable accumulation of anguish."

VIII.
PURGATORY.

BUT Dante's stern genius could no less dwell and luxuriate on softer and tenderer images. What effort of human fancy ever equalled the ineffable calm, rapture, and abandonment which pervades his rhymes, when finally emerging from that blind abyss of all sorrows, he breathes again the vital air, and descries from afar "the tremulous glitter of the ocean wave."

It is not for me to test the soundness of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, or to inquire which of the holy fathers first dreamt of its existence. It was, however, a sublime contrivance, unscriptural though it may be; a conception full of love and charity, in so far as it seemed to arrest the dead on the threshold of eternity, and by making his final welfare partly dependent on the pious exertions of those who were left behind, established a lasting interchange of tender feelings, embalmed the memory of the departed, and, by a posthumous tie, wedded him to the mourning

survivor.

There is order and method in the most grievous errors, in the most arrant follies of mankind. The finger of Providence is traceable throughout man's history upon earth. Popery and monkhood-nay, even purgatory-had their own great purpose to work out. Woe to the man, in Dante's age, who sunk in his grave without bequeathing a heritage of love; on whose sod no refreshing dew of sorrowing affection descended. Lonely as his relics in his sepulchre, his spirit wandered in the dreaded region of probation; alone he was left, defenceless, prayerless, friendless, to settle his awful scores with unmitigated justice!

It is this feeling, unrivalled for poetic beauty in Christian religion, that gives colour and tone to the second division of Dante's poem. The five or six cantos, at the opening, have all the milk of human nature that entered into the composition of that miscalled saturnine mind. little more than two words, the poet makes us aware that we have come