purify his soul by showing him the state need not be told, Pagan customs of all

of things in the next world. She deputes the soul of his master Virgil to conduct him through hell and purgatory, and then takes him herself through the spheres of heaven, where St. Peter catechises and confirms him, and where he is finally honoured with sights of the Virgin Mary, of Christ, and even a glimpse of the Supreme Being!

His hell, considered as a place, is, to speak geologically, a most fantastical formation. It descends from beneath Jerusalem to the centre of the earth, and is a funnel graduated in circles, each circle being a separate place of torment for a different vice or its co-ordinates, and the point of the funnel terminating with Satan stuck into ice. Purgatory is a corresponding mountain on the other side of the globe, commencing with the antipodes of Jerusalem, and divided into exterior circles of expiation, which end in a table-land forming the terrestrial paradise. From this the hero and his mistress ascend by a flight, exquisitely conceived, to the stars; where the sun and the planets of the Ptolemaic system (for the true one was unknown in Dante's time) form a series of heavens for different virtues, the whole terminating in the empyrean, or region of pure light, and the presence of the Beatific Vision.

The boundaries of old and new, strange as it may now seem to us, were so confused in those days, and books were so rare, and the Latin poets held in such invincible reverence, that Dante, in one and the same poem, speaks of the false gods of Paganism, and yet retains much of its lower mythology; nay, invokes Apollo himself at the door of Paradise. There was, perhaps, some mystical and even philosophical inclusion of the past in this medley, as recognising the constant superintendence of Providence; but that Dante partook of what may be called the literary superstition of the time, even for want of better knowledge, is clear from the grave historical use he makes of poetic fables in his treatise on Monarchy, and in the very arguments which he puts into the mouths of saints and apostles. There are lingering feelings to this effect even now among the peasantry of Italy; where, the reader

sorts, including religious and most reverend ones, are existing under the sanction of other names,-heathenisms christened. A Tuscan postilion, once enumerating to me some of the native poets, concluded his list with Apollo; and a plaster-cast man over here, in London, appeared much puzzled, when conversing on the subject with a friend of mine, how to discrepate Samson from Hercules.

Dante, accordingly, while, with the frightful bigotry of the schools, he puts the whole Pagan world into hell-borders, (with the exception of two or three, whose salvation adds to the absurdity,) mingles the hell of Virgil with that of Tertullian and St. Dominic; sets Minos at the door as judge; retains Charon in his old office of boatman over the Stygian lake; puts fabulous people with real among the damned, Dido, and Cacus, and Ephialtes, with Ezzelino and Pope Nicholas the Fifth; and associates the Centaurs and the Furies with the agents of diabolical torture. It has pleased him also to elevate Cato of Utica to the office of warder of purgatory, though the cen sor's poor, good wife, Marcia, is detained in the regions below. By these and other far greater inconsistencies, the whole place of punishment becomes a reductio ad absurdum, as ridiculous as it is melan. choly; so that one is astonished how so great a man, and especially a man who thought himself so far advanced beyond his age, and who possessed such powers of discerning the good and beautiful, could endure to let his mind live in so foul and foolish a region for any length of time, and there wreak and harden the unworthiest of his passions. Genius, nevertheless, is so commensurate with absurdity throughout the book, and there are even such sweet and balmy as well as sublime pictures in it occasionally, nay often, that not only will the poem ever be worthy of admiration, but, when those increasing purifications of Christianity which our blessed reformers began shall finally precipitate the whole dregs of the author into the mythology to which they belong, the world will derive a pleasure from it to an amount not to be conceived till the arrival of that day. Dante, mean

time, with an impartiality which has its smiles and its beatitude; but always been admired by those who can approve excepting the poetry, especially the the assumption of a theological tyranny similes brought from the more heavenly at the expense of common feeling and earth,-we realise little but a fantastical decency, has put friends as well as foes assemblage of doctors and doubtful chainto hell,-tutors of his childhood, kins-racters, far more angry and theological of those who treated him hospitably, than celestial; giddy raptures of monks f her of his beloved friend,

tures; and whatever he paints, he throws, as it were, upon its own powers; as though an artist should draw figures that started into life, and proceeded to action for themselves, frightening their creator. Every motion, word, and look of these creatures becomes full of sensibility and suggestions. The invisible is at the back of the visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence describes a character, nay, forms the most striking part of a story; a word acts as a flash of lightning, which displays some gloomy neighbourhood, where a tower is standing, with dreadful faces at the window; or where, at your feet, full of eternal voices, one abyss is beheld dropping out of another in the lurid light of torment.

dark as cinders, but has a sword in his hand too sparkling to be gazed at. Dante's occasional pictures of the beauties of external nature are worthy of these angelic creations, and to the last degree fresh and lovely. You long to bathe you eyes, smarting with the fumes of hell, in his dews. You gaze enchanted on his green fields and his celestial blue skies, the more so from the pain and sorrow in midst of which the visions are created.

Dante's grandeur of every kind is proportionate to that of his angels, almost to his ferocity; and that is saying everything. It is not always the spiritual grandeur of Milton, the subjection of the material impression to the moral; but it is equally such when he chooses, and far more abundant. His infernal precipices

Ginguéné has remarked the singular variety, as well as beauty, of Dante's angels. Milton's, indeed, are common--his black whirlwinds-his innumerable place in the comparison. In the eighth canto of the Inferno, the devils insolently refuse the poet and his guide an entrance into the city of Dis. An angel comes sweeping over the Stygian lake to enforce it; the noise of his wings makes the shores tremble, and is like a crashing whirlwind, such as beats down the trees and sends the peasants and their herds flying before it. The heavenly messenger, after rebuking the devils, touches the portals of the city with his wand; they fly open; and he returns the way he came without uttering a word to the two companions. His face was that of one occupied with other thoughts. This angel is announced by a tempest. Another, who brings the souls of the departed to Purgatory, is first discovered at a distance, gradually disclosing white splendours, which are his wings and garments. He comes in a boat, of which his wings are the sails; and as he approaches, it is impossible to look him in the face for its brightness. Two other angels have green wings and green garments, and the drapery is kept in motion like a flag by the vehement action of the wings. A fifth has a face like the morning star, casting forth quivering beams. A sixth is of a lustre so oppressive, that the poet feels a weight on his eyes before he knows what is coming. Another's presence affects the senses like the fragrance of a May morning; and another is in garments

cries and claspings of hands his very odours of huge loathsomeness-his giants at twilight standing up to the middle in pits, like towers, and causing earthquakes when they move-his earthquake of the mountain in Purgatory, when a spirit is set free for heaven-his dignified Mantuan Sordello, silently regarding him and his guide as they go by, "like a lion on his watch his blasphemer, Capaneus, lying in unconquered rage and sullenness under an eternal rain of flakes of fire (human precursor of Milton's Satan)his aspect of Paradise," as if the universe had smiled his inhabitants of the whole planet Saturn crying out so loud, in accordance with the anti-Papal indig nation of Saint Pietro Damiano, that the poet, though among them, could not hear what they said—and the blushing eclipse, like red clouds at sunset, which takes place at the Apostle Peter's denunciation of the sanguinary filth of the court of Rome,-all these sublimities, and many more, make us not know whether to be more astonished at the greatness of the poet or the raging littleness of the man. Grievous is it to be forced to bring two such opposites together; and I wish, for the honour and glory of poetry, I did not feel compelled to do so. But the swarthy Florentine had not the healthy temperament of his brethren, and he fell upon evil times. Compared with Homer and Shakespeare, his very intensity seems

name.

DANTE AND TACITUS.

By Rev. H. H. Milman, History of Latin
Christianity, Book XIV. ch. 5.

only superior to theirs from an excess of usual personal delight in a poet and his the morbid; and he is inferior to both in other sovereign qualities of poetry, -to the one, in giving you the healthiest general impression of nature itself,-to Shakespeare, in boundless universality, -to most great poets, in thorough harmony and delightfulness. He wanted (generally speaking) the music of a happy and a happy-making disposition. Homer, from his large vital bosom, breathes like a broad fresh air over the world, amidst alternate storm and sunshine, making you aware that there is rough work to be faced, but also activity and beauty to be enjoyed. The feeling of health and strength is predominant. Life laughs at death itself, or meets it with a noble confidence,—is not taught to dread it as a malignant goblin. Shakespeare has all the smiles as well as tears of Nature, and discerns the "soul of goodness in things evil." He is comedy as well as tragedy, the entire man in all his qualities, moods, and experiences; and he beautifies all. And both those truly divine poets make Nature their subject through her own inspiriting medium,not through the darkened glass of one man's spleen and resentment. Dante, in constituting himself the hero of his poem, not only renders her, in the general impression, as dreary as himself, in spite of the occasional beautiful pictures he draws of her, but narrows her very immensity into his pettiness. He fancied, alas! that he could build her universe over again out of the politics of old Rome and the divinity of the schools!

All that Dante said or did has its interest for us in spite of his errors, because he was an earnest and suffering man and a great genius; but his fame must ever continue to lie where his greatest blame does, in his principal work. He was a gratuitous logician a preposterous politician, a cruel theologian; but his wonderful imagination, and (considering the bitterness that was in him) still more wonderful sweetness, have gone into the hearts of his fellow-creatures, and will remain there in spite of the moral and religious absurdities with which they are mingled, and of the inability which the best-natured readers feel to associate his entire memory, as a poet, with their

Christendom owes to Dante the crea tion of Italian Poetry, through Italian, of Christian Poetry. It required all the courage, firmness, and prophetic sagacity of Dante to throw aside the inflexible bondage of the established hierarchical Latin of Europe. He had almost yielded, and had actually commenced the Divine Comedy in the ancient, it seemed, the universal and eternal language. But the poet had profoundly meditated, and deliberately resolved on his appeal to the Italian mind and heart. Yet even then he had to choose, to a certain extent to form, the pure, vigorous, picturesque, harmonious Italian which was to be intelligible, which was to become native and popular to the universal ear of Italy. He had to create; out of a chaos he had to summon light. Every kingdom, every province, every district, almost every city, had its dialect, péculiar, separate, distinct, rude in construction, harsh, in different degrees, in utterance. Dante in his book on Vulgar Eloquence, ranges over the whole land, rapidly discusses the Sicilian and Apulian, the Roman and Spoletan, the Tuscan and Genoese, the Romagnole and the Lombard, the Trevisan and Venetian, the Istrian and Friulian; all are coarse, harsh, mutilated, defective. The least bad is the vulgar Bolognese. But high above all this discord he seems to discern, and to receive into his prophetic ears, a noble and pure language, common to all, peculiar to none--a language which he describes as Illustrious, Cardinal, Courtly, if we may use our phrase, Parliamentary, that is, of the palace, the courts of justice, and of public affairs. No doubt it sprung, though its affiliation is by no means clear, out of the universal degenerate Latin, the rustic tongue, common not in Italy alone, but in all the provinces of the Roman Empire. Its first domicile was the splendid Sicilian and Apulian Court of Frederick the Second, and of

his accomplished son. It has been boldly guage, of which, if he was not abso said, that it was part of Frederick's mag-lutely the creator, he was the first who nificent design of universal empire: he gave it permanent and vital being, arose would make Italy one realm, under one one of the great poets of the world. king, and speaking one language. Dante There is a vast chasm between the does homage to the noble character of close of Roman and the dawn of Italian Frederick the Second, Sicily was the letters, between the period at which birthplace of Italian Poetry. The Sicilian appeared the last creative work written Poems live to bear witness to the truth by transcendent human genius in the of Dante's assertion, which might rest on Roman language, while yet in its conhis irrefragable authority alone. The summate strength and perfection, and Poems, one even earlier than the Court the first in which Italian poetry and of Frederick, those of Frederick himself, the Italian tongue came forth in their of Pietro della Vigna, of King Enzio, of majesty; between the history of TaciKing Manfred, with some peculiarities in tus and the Divina Commedia. No the formation, orthography, use, and one, can appreciate more highly than sounds of words, are intelligible from one myself (if I may venture to speak of end of the peninsula to the other. The myself) the great works of ecclesiastical language was echoed and perpetuated, or Latin, the Vulgate, parts of the Ritual, rather resounded spontaneously, among St. Augustine: yet who can deny that poets in other districts. This courtly, there is barbarism, a yet unreconciled aristocratical, universal Italian, Dante confusion of uncongenial elements, of heard as the conventional dialect in the Orientalism and Occidentalism, in the Courts of the Cæsars, in the republics, in language? From the time of Trajan, the principalities throughout Italy. Per- except Claudian, Latin letters are almost haps Dante, the Italian, the Ghibelline, exclusively Christian; and Christian the assertor of the universal temporal letters are Latin, as it were, in a secondmonarchy, dwelt not less fondly in his ary and degenerate form. The new era imagination on this universal and noble opens with Dante. Italian language, because it would supersede the Papal and hierarchical Latin; the Latin, with the Pope himself, would withdraw into the sanctuary, into the service of the Church, into affairs purely spiritual.

However this might be, to this vehicle of his noble thoughts Dante fearlessly intrusted his poetic immortality, which no poet anticipated with more confident security. While the scholar Petrarch condescended to the vulgar tongue in his amatory poems, which he had still a lurking fear might be but ephemeral, in his Africa and in his Latin verses he laid up, as he fondly thought, an imperishable treasure of fame. Even Boccaccio, happily for his own glory, followed the example of Dante, as he too probably supposed in his least enduring work, his gay Decamerone. Yet Boccaccio doubted, towards the close of his life, whether the Divine Comedy had not been more sublime, and therefore destined to a more secure eternity, in Latin.

To my mind there is a singular kindred and similitude between the last great Latin and the first great Italian writer, though one is a poet, the other an historian. Tacitus and Dante have the same penetrative truth of observation as to man and the external world of man; the same power of expressing that truth. They have the common gift of flashing a whole train of thought, a vast range of images on the mind, by a few brief and pregnant words; the same faculty of giving life to human emotions by natural images, of imparting to natural images, as it were, human life and human sympathies: each has the intuitive judgment of saying just enough; the stern self-restraint which will not say more than enough; the rare talent of compressing a mass of profound thought into an apophthegm; paints with words, with the fewest pos sible words, yet the picture lives and speaks. Each has that relentless moral indignation, that awful power of satire, which in the historian condemns to an

each

Thus in Italy, with the Italian lan-immortality of earthly infamy, in the