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"Thou roote of fals loveres, duke Jason! Thou slye devourer and confusyon Of gentil wommen, gentil creatures!' 92. When the women of Lemnos put to death all the male inhabitants of the island, Hypsipyle concealed her father Thoas, and spared his life. Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautics, II., Fawkes's Tr.: —

"Hypsipyle alone, illustrious maid,

Spared her sire Thoas, who the sceptre swayed."

122. "Allessio Interminelli," says Benvenuto da Imola, 66 a soldier, a nobleman, and of gentle manners, was of Lucca, and from him descended that tyrant Castruccio who filled all Tuscany with fear, and was lord of Pisa, Lucca, and Pistoja, of whom Dante

makes no mention, because he became illustrious after the author's death. Alessio took such delight in flattery, that he could not open his mouth without flattering. He besmeared everybody, even the lowest menials."

The Ottimo says, that in the dialect of Lucca the head "was facetiously called a pumpkin."

133. Thaïs, the famous courtesan of Athens. Terence, The Eunuch, Act III. Sc. 1:

"Thraso. Did Thaïs really return me many thanks?

"Gnatho. Exceeding thanks. "Thraso. Was she delighted, say you?

"Gnatho. Not so much, indeed, at the present itself, as because it was given by you; really, in right earnest, she does exult at that."

136. "The filthiness of some passages," exclaims Landor, Pentameron, p. 15, "would disgrace the drunkenest horse-dealer; and the names of such criminals are recorded by the poet, as would be forgotten by the hangman in six months."

CANTO XIX.

1. The Third Bolgia is devoted to the Simoniacs, so called from Simon Magus, the Sorcerer mentioned in Acts viii. 9, 18. See Par. XXX. Note 147.

Brunetto Latini touches lightly upon them in the Tesoretto, XXI. 259, on account of their high ecclesiastical dig

nity. His pupil is less reverential in this particular.

"Altri per simonia

Si getta in mala via,

E Dio e' Santi offende

E vende le prebende, E Sante Sagramente,

E mette 'nfra la gente Assempri di mal fare.

Ma questo lascio stare, Chè tocca a ta' persone,

Che non è mia ragione Di dirne lungamente." Chaucer, Persones Tale, speaks thus of Simony:

"Certes simonie is cleped of Simon Magus, that wold have bought for temporel catel the yefte that God had yeven by the holy gost to Seint Peter, and to the Apostles: and therfore understond ye, that both he that selleth and he that byeth thinges spirituel ben called Simoniackes, be it by catel, be it by procuring, or by fleshly praier of his frendes, fleshly frendes, or spirituel frendes, fleshly in two maners, as by kinrede or other frendes: sothly, if they pray for him that is not worthy

and able, it is simonie, if he take the benefice and if he be worthy and able, ther is non."

5. Gower, Confes. Amant. I. :—
"A trompe with a sterne breth,
Which was cleped the trompe of deth.

He shall this dred full trompe blowe
To-fore his gate and make it knowe,
How that the jugement is yive

Of deth, which shall nought be foryive." 19. Lami, in his Delicia Eruditorum, makes a strange blunder in reference to this passage. He says: "Not long ago the baptismal font, which stood in the middle of Saint John's at Florence, was removed; and in the pavement may still be seen the octagonal shape of its ample outline. Dante says, that, when a boy, he fell into it

and was near drowning; or rather he fell into one of the circular basins of water, which surrounded the principal font." Upon this Arrivabeni, Comento Storico, p. 588, where I find this extract, remarks: "Not Dante, but Lami, staring at the moon, fell into the hole."

20. Dante's enemies had accused him of committing this act through impiety. He takes this occasion to vindicate himself.

33. Probably an allusion to the red stockings worn by the Popes.

50. Burying alive with the head downward and the feet in the air was the inhuman punishment of hired assassins, "according to justice and the municipal law in Florence," says the Oftimo. It was called Propagginare, to plant in the manner of vine-stocks.

Dante stood bowed down like the confessor called back by the criminal in order to delay the moment of his death.

53. Benedetto Gaetani, Pope Boniface VIII. Gower, Conf. Amant. II., calls him

"Thou Boneface, thou proude clerke,
Misleder of the papacie."

This is the Boniface who frightened Celestine from the papacy, and persecuted him to death after his resignation. "The lovely Lady" is the Church. The fraud was his collusion with Charles II. of Naples. "He went to King Charles by night, secretly, and with few attendants," says Villani,VIII. ch. 6," and said to him: King, thy Pope Celestine had the will and the power to serve thee in thy Sicilian

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wars, but did not know how: but if thou wilt contrive with thy friends the cardinals to have me elected Pope, I shall know how, and shall have the will and the power'; promising upon his faith and oath to aid him with all the power of the Church." Farther on he continues: "He was very magnanimous and lordly, and demanded great honor, and knew well how to maintain and advance the cause of the Church, and on account of his knowledge and power was much dreaded and feared. He was avaricious exceedingly in order to aggrandize the Church and his relations, not being over-scrupulous about gains, for he said that all things were lawful which were of the Church."

He was chosen Pope in 1294. "The inauguration of Boniface," says Milman, Latin Christ., Book IX., ch. 7, "was the most magnificent which Rome had ever beheld.

In his pro

cession to St. Peter's and back to the Lateran palace, where he was entertained, he rode not a humble ass, but a noble white horse, richly caparisoned he had a crown on his head; the King of Naples held the bridle on one side, his son, the King of Hungary, on the other. The nobility of Rome, the Orsinis, the Colonnas, the Savellis, the Stefaneschi, the Annibaldi, who had not only welcomed him to Rome, but conferred on him the Senatorial dignity, followed in a body: the procession could hardly force its way through the masses of the kneeling people. In the midst, a furious hurricane burst over the city, and extin

guished every lamp and torch in the church. A darker omen followed: a riot broke out among the populace, in which forty lives were lost. The day after, the Pope dined in public in the Lateran; the two Kings waited behind his chair."

Dante indulges towards him a fierce Ghibelline hatred, and assigns him his place of torment before he is dead. In Canto XXVII. 85, he calls him "the Prince of the new Pharisees"; and, after many other bitter allusions in various parts of the poem, puts into the mouth of St. Peter, Par. XXVII. 22, the terrible invective that makes the whole heavens red with anger.

"He who usurps upon the earth my place,

My place, my place, which vacant has be

come

Now in the presence of the Son of God, Has of my cemetery made a sewer

Of blood and fetor, whereat the Perverse,

Who fell from here, below there is appeased."

He died in 1303. See Note 87, Purg. XX.

70. Nicholas III., of the Orsini (the Bears) of Rome, chosen Pope in 1277. "He was the first Pope, or one of the first," says Villani, VII. ch. 54, “in whose court simony was openly practised." On account of his many accomplishments he was surnamed Il Compiuto. Milman, Lat. Christ., Book XI. ch. 4, says of him: "At length the election fell on John Gaetano, of the noble Roman house, the Orsini, a man of remarkable beauty of person and demeanor. His name, the Accom

plished,' implied that in him met all the graces of the handsomest clerks in the world, but he was a man likewise of irreproachable morals, of vast ambition, and of great ability." He died. in 1280.

83. The French Pope Clement V., elected in 1305, by the influence of Philip the Fair of France, with sundry humiliating conditions. He transferred the Papal See from Rome to Avignon, where it remained for seventy-one years in what Italian writers call its "Babylonian captivity." He died in 1314, on his way to Bordeaux. "He had hardly crossed the Rhone," says Milman, Lat. Christ., Book XII. ch. 5, "when he was seized with mortal

sickness at Roquemaure. The Papal treasure was seized by his followers, especially his nephew; his remains. were treated with such utter neglect, that the torches set fire to the catafalque under which he lay, not in state. His body, covered only with a single sheet, all that his rapacious retinue had left to shroud their forgotten master, was half burned . . . . . before alarm was raised. His ashes were borne back to Carpentras and solemnly interred."

.....

85. Jason, to whom Antiochus Epiphanes granted a "license to set him up a place for exercise, and for the training up of youth in the fashions of the heathen."

2 Maccabees iv. 13: "Now such was the height of Greek fashions, and increase of the heathenish manners, through the exceeding profaneness of Jason, that ungodly wretch and not

high priest, that the priests had no courage to serve any more at the altar, but, despising the temple, and neglecting the sacrifices, hastened to be partakers of the unlawful allowance in the place of exercise, after the game of Discus called them forth."

87. Philip the Fair of France. See Note 82. "He was one of the handsomest men in the world," says Villani, IX. 66," and one of the largest in person, and well proportioned in every limb, a wise and good man for a layman."

94. Matthew, chosen as an Apostle in the place of Judas.

99. According to Villani, VII. 54, Pope Nicholas III. wished to marry his niece to a nephew of Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily. To this alliance the King would not consent, saying: "Although he wears the red stockings, his lineage is not worthy to mingle with ours, and his power is not hereditary." This made the Pope indignant, and, together with the bribes of John of Procida, led him to encourage the rebellion in Sicily, which broke out a year after the Pope's death in the "Sicilian Vespers," 1282.

107. The Church of Rome under Nicholas, Boniface, and Clement. Revelation xvii. 1–3:·

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"And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters; with whom the kings of the earth have committed for

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nication, and the inhabitants of the

earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness

and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns."

The seven heads are interpreted to mean the Seven Virtues, and the ten horns the Ten Commandments.

110. Revelation xvii. 12, 13: "And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, . . . . . and shall give their power and strength unto the beast."

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117. Gower, Confes. Amant., Pro- actually did invest the Church, the logus:

"The patrimonie and the richesse

Which to Silvester in pure almesse
The firste Constantinus lefte."

Upon this supposed donation of immense domains by Constantine to the Pope, called the "Patrimony of St.

right of holding landed property, and receiving it by bequest, was far more valuable to the Christian hierarchy, and not least to the Bishop of Rome, than a premature and prodigal endowment."

CANTO XX.

1. In the Fourth Bolgia are punished the Soothsayers:

"Because they wished to see too far before them, Backward they look, and backward make their way."

So backward still was turned his wrinkled face."

34. Amphiaraus was one of the seven kings against Thebes. Foreseeing his own fate, he concealed himself, to avoid

9. Processions chanting prayers and going to the war; but his wife Erisupplications. phyle, bribed by a diamond necklace 13. Ignaro in Spenser's Faerie Queene, (as famous in ancient story as the CarI. viii. 31:

"But very uncouth sight was to behold

How he did fashion his untoward pace; For as he forward moved his footing old,

dinal de Rohan's in modern), revealed his hiding-place, and he went to his doom with the others.

Eschylus, The Seven against Thebes:

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