132. Even to a steadfast heart. CANTO XVII. 1. In this Canto is described the as sinners punishment of Usurers, against Nature and Art. See Inf. XI. 109 :~~ Volpi, and Venturi do not explain it. hurled down to their appointed places, The anonymous author of the Ottimo, as soon as Minos doomed them. In Benvenuto da Imola, Buti, Landino, Vel-ferno, V. 15. lutello, and Daniello, all think it means fraud, which Dante had used in the pursuit of pleasure," the panther with the painted skin.” Lombardi is of opinion that, "by girding himself with the Franciscan cord, he had endeavoured to restrain his sensual appetites, indicated by the panther; and still wearing the cord as a Tertiary of the Order, he makes it serve here to deceive Geryon, and bring him up." Biagioli understands by it "the humility with which a man should approach Science, because it is she that humbles the proud." Fraticelli thinks it means vigilance; Tommaseo, "the good faith with which he hoped to win the Florentines, and now wishes to deal with their fraud, so that it may not harm him;" and Gabrielli Rossetti says, "Dante flattered himself, acting as a sincere Ghibelline, that he should meet with good faith from his Guelf countrymen, and met instead with horrible fraud." Dante elsewhere speaks of the cord in a good sense. In Purgatorio, VII. 114, Peter of Aragon is "girt with the cord of every virtue. In Inferno, XXVII. 92, it is mortification, "the cord that used to make those girt with it more meagre ;" and in Paradiso, XI. 87, it is humility, "that family which had already girt the humble cord." It will be remembered that St. Francis, the founder of the Cordeliers (the wearers of the cord), used to call his body asino, or ass, and to subdue it with the capestro, or halter. Thus the cord is made to symbolise the subjugation of the animal nature. This renders Lombardi's interpretation the most intelligible and satisfactory, though Virgil seems to have thrown the cord into the abyss simply because he had nothing else to throw, and not with the design of deceiving. I12. As a man does naturally in the act of throwing. 131. That Geryon, seeing the cord, ascends, expecting to find some moine défroqué, and carry him down, as Lombardi suggests, is hardly admissible; for that was not his office. The spirits were "And since the usurer takes another way, The monster Geryon, here used as the symbol of Fraud, was born of Chrysaor and Callirrhoe, and is generally represented by the poets as having three bodies and three heads. He was in ancient times King of Hesperia or Spain, living on Erytheia, the Red Island of sunset, and was slain by Hercules, who drove away his beautiful oxen. The nimble fancy of Hawthorne thus depicts him in his Wonder-Book, p. 148: "But was it really and truly an old man? Certainly at first sight it looked very like one; but, on closer inspection, it rather seemed to be some kind of a creature that lived in the sea. For on his legs and arms there were scales, such as fishes have; he was web-footed and web-fingered, after the fashion of a duck; and his long beard, being of a greenish tinge, had more the appearance of a tuft of sea-weed than of an ordinary beard. Have you never seen a stick of timber, that has been long tossed about by the waves, and has got all overgrown with barnacles, and at last, drifting ashore, seems to have been thrown up from the very deepest bottom of the sea? Well, the old man would have put you in mind of just such a wave-tost spar." The three bodies and three heads, which old poetic fable has given to the monster Geryon, are interpreted by modern prose as meaning the three Balearic Islands, Majorca, Minorca, and Ivica, over which he reigned. IO. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, XIV. 87, Rose's Tr., thus depicts Fraud 66 17. Tartars nor Turks, who are most perfect masters therein," says Boccaccio, as we can clearly see in Tartarian cloths, which truly are so skilfully woven, that no painter with his brush could equal, much less surpass them. The Tartars are... And with this unfinished sentence close the Lectures upon Dante, begun by Giovanni Boccaccio on Sunday, August 9, 1373, in the church of San Stefano, in Florence. That there were some critics among his audience is apparent from this sonnet, which he addressed "to one who had censured his public Exposition of Dante." See D. G. Rosetti, Early Italian Poets, p. 447 : "If Dante mourns, there wheresoe'er he be, This were my grievous pain; and certainly Unto the thankless souls with whose base ends 18. Ovid, Metamorph. VI. : " One at the loom so excellently skilled 57. Their love of gold still haunting them in the other world. 59. The arms of the Gianfigliacci of Florence. 63. The arms of the Ubbriachi of Florence. 64. The Scrovigni of Padua. 68. Vitaliano del Dente of Padua. 73. Giovanni Bujamonte, who seems to have had the ill repute of being the greatest usurer of his day, called here in irony "the sovereign cavalier." 74. As the ass-driver did in the streets of Florence, when Dante beat him for singing his verses amiss. See Sacchetti, Nov. CXV. 78. Dante makes as short work with these usurers as if he had been a curious traveller walking through the Ghetto of Rome, or the Judengasse of Frankfort. 107. Ovid, Metamorph. II., Addison's Tr. : "Half dead with sudden fear he dropt the reins; The horses felt 'em. loose upon their manes, And, flying out through all the plains above, Ran uncontroiled where'er their fury drove; Rushed on the stars, and through a pathless way Of unknown regions hurried on the day. The horses started with a sudden bound, Here fell a wheel, and here a silver spoke, ments lay. The breathless Phaeton, with flaming hair, Till on the Po his blasted corpse was hurled, 108. The Milky Way. In Spanish El camino de Santiago; in the Northern Mythology the pathway of the ghosts going to Valhalla. 109. Ovid, Metamorph. VIII., Croxall's Tr. : "The soft'ning wax, that felt a nearer sun, 136. "To him the Balearic sling is slow, And the shaft loiters from the Parthian bow." Lucan, Pharsal, I. : The Eighth Circle is called Malebolge, or Evil-budgets, and consists of ten concentric ditches, or Bolge, of stone, with dikes between, and rough bridges running across them to the centre like the spokes of a wheel. In the First Bolgia are punished Seducers, and in the second Flatterers. 2. Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III. p. 237, says:— the Apennine limestones nearly always are; the gray being peculiarly cold and disagreeable. As we go down the very hill which stretches out from Pietra-pana towards Lucca, the stones laid by the road-side to mend it are of this ashen gray, with efflorescences of manganese and iron in the fissures. The whole of Malebolge is made of this rock, wrought in stone of iron-coloured grain.' 29. The year of Jubilee 1300. Mr. Norton, in his Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, p. 255, thus describes it :- All "The beginning of the new century brought many pilgrims to the Papal city, and the Pope, seeing to what account the treasury of indulgences possessed by the Church might now be turned, hit upon the plan of promising plenary indulgence to all who, during "Our slates and granites are often the year, should visit with fit dispositions of very lovely colours; but the Aren- the holy places of Rome. He, accordnine limestone is so gray and toneless, ingly, in the most solemn manner, prothat I know not any mountain dis- claimed a year of Jubilee, to date from trict so utterly melancholy as those the Christmas of 1299, and appointed a which are composed of this rock, when similar celebration for each hundredth unwooded. Now, as far as I can disco- year thereafter. The report of the mar ver from the internal evidence in his vellous promise spread rapidly through poein, nearly all Dante's mountain wan-Europe; and, as the year advanced, derings had been upon this ground. He pilgrims poured into Italy from remote had journeyed once or twice among the Alps, indeed, but seems to have been impressed chiefly by the road from Garda to Trent, and that along the Cornice, both of which are either upon those limestones, or a dark serpentine, which shows hardly any colour till it is polished. It is not ascertainable that he had ever seen rock scenery of the finely coloured kind, aided by the Alpine mosses: I do not know the fall at Forli (Inferno, XVI. 99), but every other scene to which he alludes is among these Apennine limestones; and when he wishes to give the idea of enormous mountain size he names Tabernicch and Pietra-pana,-the one clearly chosen only for the sake of the last syllable of its name, in order to make a sound as of crackling ice, with the two sequent rhymes of the stanza,-and the other is an Apennine near Lucca. "His idea, therefore, of rock colour, founded on these experiences, is that of a dull or ashen gray, more or less stained by the brown of iron ochre, precisely as The as well as from neighbouring lands. The roads leading to Rome were dusty with bands of travellers pressing forward to gain the unwonted indulgence. Crusades had made travel familiar to men, and a journey to Rome seemed easy to those who had dreamed of the Farther East, of Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Giovanni Villani, who was among the pilgrims from Florence, declares that there were never less than two hundred thousand strangers at Rome during the year; and Guglielmo Ven tura, the chronicler of Asti, reports the total number of pilgrims at not less than two millions. The picture which he draws of Rome during the Jubilee is a curious one. 'Mirandum est quod pas sim ibant viri et mulieres, qui anno illo Romæ fuerunt quo ego ibi fui et per die xv. steti. De pane, vino, carnibus, pis cibus, et avena, bonum mercatum ibi erat fanum carissimum ibi fuit; hospitia ca rissima; taliter quod lectus meus et equ mei super fæno et avena constabat mih tornesium unum grossum. Exiens Roma in Vigilia Nativitatis Christi, vidi turbam magnam, quàm dinumerare nemo poterat; et fama erat inter Romanos, quod ibi fuerant plusquam vigenti centum millia virorum et mulierum. Pluries ego ridi ibi tam viros quam mulieres conculatos sub pedibus aliorum; et etiam egomet in eodem periculo plures vices evasi. Papa innumerabilem pecuniam ab eisdem recepit, quia die ac nocte duo clerici stabant ad altare Sancti Pauli tenentes in eorum manibus rastellos, rastellantes pecuniam infinitam.' To accommodate the throng of pilgrims, and to protect them as far as possible from the danger which Ventura feelingly describes, a barrier was erected along the middle of the bridge, under the Castle of Sant' Angelo, so that those going to St. Peter's and those coming from the church, passing on opposite sides, might not interfere with each other. It seems not unlikely that Dante himself was one of the crowd who thus crossed the old bridge, over whose arches, during this year, a flood of men was flowing almost as constantly as the river's flood ran through below. 31. The castle is the Castle of St. Angelo, and the mountain Monte Gianicolo. See Barlow, Study of Dante, p. 126. Others say Monte Giordano. 50. "This Caccianimico," says Benvenuto da Imola, "was a Bolognese; a liberal, noble, pleasant, and very powerful mån." Nevertheless, he was so utterly corrupt as to sell his sister, the fair Ghisola, to the Marquis of Este. 51. In the original the word is salse. "In Bologna," says Benvenuto da Imola, "the name of Salse is given to a certain valley outside the city, and near to Santa Maria in Monte, into which the mortal remains of desperadoes, usurers, and other infamous persons are wont to be thrown. Hence I have sometimes heard boys in Bologna say to each other, by way of insult, Your father was thrown into the Salse." 61. The two rivers between which Bologna is situated. In the Bolognese dialect sipa is used for sì. 72. They cease going round the circles as heretofore, and now go straight forward to the centre of the abyss. I. The Third Bolgia is devoted to the Simoniacs, so called from Simon 86. For the story of Jason, Medea, | Magus, the Sorcerer mentioned in Acts "Altri per simonia Si getta in mala via, E mette 'nfra la gente Che non è mia ragione 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 kindrede 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. :- He shall this dredfull trompe blowe 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 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 assas sins, "according to justice and the municipal law in Florence," says the Ot timo. 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 Boni face VIII. Gower, Conf. Amant. II., calls him "Thou Boneface, thou proude clerke, This is the Boniface who frightened Celestine from the papacy, and perse cuted 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 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 honour, 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 overscrupulous 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, |