Chapter I: The Journey Through Hell (2)

Virgil addressed Ulysses, who told him the conclusion of his adventures, not to be found in books: how he tired of an idle life, and sailed forth again into the wide ocean; and how he sailed so far that he came into a region of new stars, and in sight of a mountain, the loftiest he ever saw; when, unfortunately, a hurricane fell upon them from the shore, thrice whirled their vessel round, then dashed the stern up in air and the prow under water, and sent the billows over their heads.

"Enough," said Virgil; "I trouble thee no more." The soul of Guido di Montefeltro, overhearing the great Mantuan speak in a Lombard dialect, asked him news of the state of things in Romagna; and then told him how he had lost his chance of paradise, by thinking Pope Boniface could at once absolve him from his sins, and use them for his purposes.[34] He was going to heaven, he said, by the help of St. Francis, who came on purpose to fetch him, when a black angel met them, and demanded his absolved, indeed, but unrepented victim. "To repent evil, and to will to do it, at one and the same time, are," said the dreadful angel, "impossible: therefore wrong me not."

"Oh, how I shook," said the unhappy Guido, "when he laid his hands upon me!" And with these words the flame writhed and beat itself about for agony, and so took its way.

The pilgrims crossed over to the banks of the ninth gulf, where the Sowers of Scandal, the Schismatics, Heretics, and Founders of False Religions, underwent the penalties of such as load themselves with the sins of those whom they seduce.

The first sight they beheld was Mahomet, tearing open his own bowels, and calling out to them to mark him. Before him walked his son-in-law, Ali, weeping, and cloven to the chin; and the divisions in the church were punished in like manner upon all the schismatics in the place. They all walked round the circle, their gashes closing as they went; and on their reaching a certain point, a fiend hewed them open again with a sword. The Arabian prophet, ere he passed on, bade the pilgrims warn Friar Dolcino how he suffered himself to be surprised in his mountain-hold by the starvations of winter-time, if he did not wish speedily to follow him.[35]

Among other mangled wretches, they beheld Piero of Medicina, a sower of dissension, exhibiting to them his face and throat all over wounds; and Curio, compelled to shew his tongue cut out for advising Cæsar to cross the Rubicon; and Mosca de' Lamberti, an adviser of assassination, and one of the authors of the Guelf and Ghibelline miseries, holding up the bleeding stumps of his arms, which dripped on his face. "Remember Mosca," cried he; "remember him, alas! who said, 'A deed done is a thing ended.' A bad saying of mine was that for the Tuscan nation."

"And death to thy family," cried Dante.

The assassin hurried away like a man driven mad with grief upon grief; and Dante now beheld a sight, which, if it were not, he says, for the testimony of a good conscience--that best of friends, which gives a man assurance of himself under the breastplate of a spotless innocence[36]--he should be afraid to relate without further proof. He saw--and while he was writing the account of it he still appeared to see--a headless trunk about to come past him with the others. It held its severed head by the hair, like a lantern; and the head looked up at the two pilgrims, and said, "Woe is me!" The head was, in fact, a lantern to the paths of the trunk; and thus there were two separated things in one, and one in two; and how that could be, he only can tell who ordained it. As the figure came nearer, it lifted the head aloft, that the pilgrims might hear better what it said. "Behold," it said, "behold, thou that walkest living among the dead, and say if there be any punishment like this. I am Bertrand de Born, he that incited John of England to rebel against his father. Father and son I set at variance--closest affections I set at variance--and hence do I bear my brain severed from the body on which it grew. In me behold the work of retribution." [37]

The eyes of Dante were so inebriate with all that diversity of bleeding wounds, that they longed to stay and weep ere his guide proceeded further. Something also struck them on the sudden which added to his desire to stop. But Virgil asked what ailed him, and why he stood gazing still on the wretched multitude. "Thou hast not done so," continued he, "in any other portion of this circle; and the valley is twenty-two miles further about, and the moon already below us. Thou hast more yet to see than thou wottest of, and the time is short."

Dante, excusing himself for the delay, and proceeding to follow his leader, said he thought he had seen, in the cavern at which he was gazing so hard, a spirit that was one of his own family--and it was so. It was the soul of Geri del Bello, a cousin of the poet's. Virgil said that he had observed him, while Dante was occupied with Bertrand de Born, pointing at his kinsman in a threatening manner. "Waste not a thought on him," concluded the Roman, "but leave him as he is." "O honoured guide!" said Dante, "he died a violent death, which his kinsmen have not yet avenged; and hence it is that he disdained to speak to me; and I must needs feel for him the more on that account." [38]

They came now to the last partition of the circle of Evil-budget, and their ears were assailed with such a burst of sharp wailings, that Dante was fain to close his with his hands. The misery there, accompanied by a horrible odour, was as if all the hospitals in the sultry marshes of Valdichiana had brought their maladies together into one infernal ditch. It was the place of punishment for pretended Alchemists, Coiners, Personators of other people, False Accusers, and Impostors of all such descriptions. They lay on one another in heaps, or attempted to crawl about--some itching madly with leprosies--some swollen and gasping with dropsies--some wetly reeking, like hands washed in winter-time. One was an alchemist of Sienna, a nation vainer than the French; another a Florentine, who tricked a man into making a wrong will; another, Sinon of Troy; another, Myrrha; another, the wife of Potiphar. Their miseries did not hinder them from giving one another malignant blows; and Dante was listening eagerly to an abusive conversation between Sinon and a Brescian coiner, when Virgil rebuked him for the disgraceful condescension, and said it was a pleasure fit only for vulgar minds.[39]

The blushing poet felt the reproof so deeply, that he could not speak for shame, though he manifested by his demeanour that he longed to do so, and thus obtained the pardon he despaired of. He says he felt like a man that, during an unhappy dream, wishes himself dreaming while he is so, and does not know it. Virgil understood his emotion, and, as Achilles did with his spear, healed the wound with the tongue that inflicted it.

A silence now ensued between the companions; for they had quitted Evil-budget, and arrived at the ninth great circle of hell, on the mound of which they passed along, looking quietly and steadily before them. Daylight had given place to twilight; and Dante was advancing his head a little, and endeavouring to discern objects in the distance, when his whole attention was called to one particular spot, by a blast of a horn so loud, that a thunder clap was a whisper in comparison. Orlando himself blew no such terrific blast, after the dolorous rout, when Charlemagne was defeated in his holy enterprise.[40] The poet raised his head, thinking he perceived a multitude of lofty towers. He asked Virgil to what region they belonged; but Virgil said, "Those are no towers: they are giants, standing each up to his middle in the pit that goes round this circle." Dante looked harder; and as objects clear up by little and little in the departing mist, he saw, with alarm, the tremendous giants that warred against Jove, standing half in and half out of the pit, like the towers that crowned the citadel of Monteseggione. The one whom he saw plainest, and who stood with his arms hanging down on each side, appeared to him to have a face as huge as the pinnacle of St. Peter's, and limbs throughout in proportion. The monster, as the pilgrims were going by, opened his dreadful mouth, fit for no sweeter psalmody, and called after them, in the words of some unknown tongue, _Rafel, maee amech zabee almee_.[41] "Dull wretch!" exclaimed Virgil, "keep to thine horn, and so vent better whatsoever frenzy or other passion stuff thee. Feel the chain round thy throat, thou confusion! See, what a clenching hoop is about thy gorge!" Then he said to Dante, "His howl is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he through whose evil ambition it was that mankind ceased to speak one language. Pass him, and say nothing; for every other tongue is to him, as his is to thee."

The companions went on for about the length of a sling's throw, when they passed the second giant, who was much fiercer and linger than Nimrod. He was fettered round and round with chains, that fixed one arm before him and the other behind him--Ephialtes his name, the same that would needs make trial of his strength against Jove himself. The hands which he then wielded were now motionless, but he shook with passion; and Dante thought he should have died for terror, the effect on the ground about him was so fearful. It surpassed that of a tower shaken by an earthquake. The poet expressed a wish to look at Briareus, but he was too far off. He saw, however, Antæus, who, not having fought against heaven, was neither tongue-confounded nor shackled; and Virgil requested the "taker of a thousand lions," by the fame which the living poet had it in his power to give him, to bear the travellers in his arms down the steep descent into this deeper portion of hell, which was the region of tormenting cold. Antmus, stooping, like the leaning tower of Bologna, to take them up, gathered them in his arms, and, depositing them in the gulf below, raised himself to depart like the mast of a ship.[42]

Had I hoarse and rugged words equal to my subject, says the poet, I would now make them fuller of expression, to suit the rocky horror of this hole of anguish; but I have not, and therefore approach it with fear, since it is no jesting enterprise to describe the depths of the universe, nor fit for a tongue that babbles of father and mother.[43] Let such of the Muses assist me as turned the words of Amphion into Theban walls; so shall the speech be not too far different from the matter.

Oh, ill-starred creatures! wretched beyond all others, to inhabit a place so hard to speak of--better had ye been sheep or goats.

The poet was beginning to walk with his guide along the place in which the giant had set them down, and was still looking up at the height from which he had descended, when a voice close to him said, "Have a care where thou treadest. Hurt not with thy feet the heads of thy unhappy brethren."

Dante looked down and before him, and saw that he was walking on a lake of ice, in which were Murderous Traitors up to their chins, their teeth chattering, their faces held down, their eyes locked up frozen with tears. Dante saw two at his feet so closely stuck together, that the very hairs of their heads were mingled. He asked them who they were, and as they lifted up their heads for astonishment, and felt the cold doubly congeal them, they dashed their heads against one another for hate and fury. They were two brothers who had murdered each other.[44] Near them were other Tuscans, one of whom the cold had deprived of his ears; and thousands more were seen grinning like dogs, for the pain.

Dante, as he went along, _kicked_ the face of one of them, whether by chance, or fate, or _will_,[45] he could not say. The sufferer burst into tears, and cried out, "Wherefore dost thou torment me? Art thou come to revenge the defeat at Montaperto?" The pilgrim at this question felt eager to know who he was; but the unhappy wretch would not tell. His countryman seized him by the hair to force him; but still he said he would not tell, were he to be scalped a thousand times. Dante, upon this, began plucking up his hairs by the roots, the man _barking_,[46] with his eyes squeezed up, at every pull; when another soul exclaimed, "Why, Bocca, what the devil ails thee? Must thou needs bark for cold as well as chatter?" [47]

"Now, accursed traitor, betrayer of thy country's standard," said Dante, "be dumb if thou wilt; for I shall tell thy name to the world."

"Tell and begone!" said Bocca; "but carry the name of this babbler with thee; 'tis Buoso, who left the pass open to the enemy between Piedmont and Parma; and near him is the traitor for the pope, Beccaria; and Ganellone, who betrayed Charlemagne; and Tribaldello, who opened Faenza to the enemy at night-time."

The pilgrims went on, and beheld two other spirits so closely locked up together in one hole of the ice, that the head of one was right over the other's, like a cowl; and Dante, to his horror, saw that the upper head was devouring the lower with all the eagerness of a man who is famished. The poet asked what could possibly make him skew a hate so brutal; adding, that if there were any ground for it, he would tell the story to the world.[48]

The sinner raised his head from the dire repast, and after wiping his jaws with the hair of it, said, "You ask a thing which it shakes me to the heart to think of. It is a story to renew all my misery. But since it will produce this wretch his due infamy, hear it, and you shall see me speak and weep at the same time. How thou tamest hither I know not; but I perceive by thy speech that thou art Florentine.

"Learn, then, that I was the Count Ugolino, and this man was Ruggieri the Archbishop. How I trusted him, and was betrayed into prison, there is no need to relate; but of his treatment of me there, and how cruel a death I underwent, bear; and then judge if he has offended me.

"I had been imprisoned with my children a long time in the tower which has since been called from me the Tower of Famine; and many a new moon had I seen through the hole that served us for a window, when I dreamt a dream that foreshadowed to me what was coming. Methought that this man headed a great chase against the wolf, in the mountains between Pisa and Lucca. Among the foremost in his party were Gualandi, Sismondi, and Lanfranchi, and the hounds were thin and eager, and high-bred; and in a little while I saw the hounds fasten on the flanks of the wolf and the wolf's children, and tear them. At that moment I awoke with the voices of my own children in my ears, asking for bread. Truly cruel must thou be, if thy heart does not ache to think of what I thought then. If thou feel not for a pang like that, what is it for which thou art accustomed to feel? We were now all awake; and the time was at hand when they brought us bread, and we had all dreamt dreams which made us anxious. At that moment I heard the key of the horrible tower turn in the lock of the door below, and fasten it. I looked at my children, and said not a word. I did not weep. I made a strong effort upon the soul within me. But my little Anselm said, 'Father, why do you look so? Is any thing the matter?' Nevertheless I did not weep, nor say a word all the day, nor the night that followed. In the morning a ray of light fell upon us through the window of our sad prison, and I beheld in those four little faces the likeness of my own face, and then I began to gnaw my hands for misery. My children, thinking I did it for hunger, raised themselves on the floor, and said, 'Father, we should be less miserable if you would eat our own flesh. It was you that gave it us. Take it again.' Then I sat still, in order not to make them unhappier: and that day and the next we all remained without speaking. On the fourth day, Gaddo stretched himself at my feet, and said, 'Father, why won't you help me?' and there he died. And as surely as thou lookest on me, so surely I beheld the whole three die in the same manner. So I began in my misery to grope about in the dark for them, for I had become blind; and three days I kept calling on them by name, though they were dead; till famine did for me what grief had been unable to do."

With these words, the miserable man, his eyes starting from his head, seized that other wretch again with his teeth, and ground them against the skull as a dog does with a bone.

O Pisa! scandal of the nations! since thy neighbours are so slow to punish thee, may the very islands tear themselves up from their roots in the sea, and come and block up the mouth of thy river, and drown every soul within thee. What if this Count Ugolino did, as report says he did, betray thy castles to the enemy? his children had not betrayed them; nor ought they to have been put to an agony like this. Their age was their innocence; and their deaths have given thee the infamy of a second Thebes.[49]

The pilgrims passed on, and beheld other traitors frozen up in swathes of ice, with their heads upside down. Their very tears had hindered them from shedding more; for their eyes were encrusted with the first they shed, so as to be enclosed with them as in a crystal visor, which forced back the others into an accumulation of anguish. One of the sufferers begged Dante to relieve him of this ice, in order that he might vent a little of the burden which it repressed. The poet said he would do so, provided he would disclose who he was. The man said he was the friar Alberigo, who invited some of his brotherhood to a banquet in order to slay them.

"What!" exclaimed Dante, "art thou no longer, then, among the living?"

"Perhaps I appear to be," answered the friar; "for the moment any one commits a treachery like mine, his soul gives up his body to a demon, who thenceforward inhabits it in the man's likeness. Thou knowest Branca Doria, who murdered his father-in-law, Zanche? He seems to be walking the earth still, and yet he has been in this place many years." [50]

"Impossible!" cried Dante; "Branca Doria is still alive; he eats, drinks, and sleeps, like any other man."

"I tell thee," returned the friar, "that the soul of the man he slew had not reached that lake of boiling pitch in which thou sawest him, ere the soul of his slayer was in this place, and his body occupied by a demon in its stead. But now stretch forth thy hand, and relieve mine eyes."

Dante relieved them not. Ill manners, he said, were the only courtesy fit for such a wretch.[51]

O ye Genoese! he exclaims,--men that are perversity all over, and full of every corruption to the core, why are ye not swept from the face of the earth? There is one of you whom you fancy to be walking about like other men, and he is all the while in the lowest pit of hell!

"Look before thee," said Virgil, as they advanced: "behold the banners of the King of Hell."

Dante looked, and beheld something which appeared like a windmill in motion, as seen from a distance on a dark night. A wind of inconceivable sharpness came from it.

The souls of those who had been traitors to their benefactors were here frozen up in depths of pellucid ice, where they were seen in a variety of attitudes, motionless; some upright, some downward, some bent double, head to foot.

At length they came to where the being stood who was once eminent for all fair seeming.[52] This was the figure that seemed tossing its arms at a distance like a windmill.

"Satan," whispered Virgil; and put himself in front of Dante to re-assure him, halting him at the same time, and bidding him summon all his fortitude. Dante stood benumbed, though conscious; as if he himself had been turned to ice. He felt neither alive nor dead.

The lord of the dolorous empire, each of his arms as big as a giant, stood in the ice half-way up his breast. He had one head, but three faces; the middle, vermilion; the one over the right shoulder a pale yellow; the other black. His sails of wings, huger than ever were beheld at sea, were in shape and texture those of a bat; and with these be constantly flapped, so as to send forth the wind that froze the depths of Tartarus. From his six eyes the tears ran down, mingling at his three chins with bloody foam; for at every mouth he crushed a sinner with his teeth, as substances are broken up by an engine. The middle sinner was the worst punished, for he was at once broken and flayed, and his head and trunk were inside the mouth. It was Judas Iscariot.

Of the other two, whose heads were hanging out, one was Brutus, and the other Cassius. Cassius was very large-limbed. Brutus writhed with agony, but uttered not a word.[53]

"Night has returned," said Virgil, "and all has been seen. It is time to depart onward."

Dante then, at his bidding, clasped, as Virgil did, the huge inattentive being round the neck; and watching their opportunity, as the wings opened and shut, they slipped round it, and so down his shaggy and frozen sides, from pile to pile, clutching it as they went; till suddenly, with the greatest labour and pain, they were compelled to turn themselves upside down, as it seemed, but in reality to regain their proper footing; for they had passed the centre of gravity, and become Antipodes.

Then looking down at what lately was upward, they saw Lucifer with his feet towards them; and so taking their departure, ascended a gloomy vault, till at a distance, through an opening above their heads, they beheld the loveliness of the stars.[54]

[Footnote 1: "Parea che l'aer ne temesse."]

[Footnote 2: "Là dove 'l sol tace." "The sun to me is dark, And _silent_ is the moon, Hid in her vacant interlunar cave."--Milton.]

[Footnote 3: There is great difference among the commentators respecting the meaning of the three beasts; some supposing them passions, others political troubles, others personal enemies, &c. The point is not of much importance, especially as a mystery was intended; but nobody, as Mr. Cary says, can doubt that the passage was suggested by one in the prophet Jeremiah, v. 6: "Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them; a leopard shall watch over their cities."]

[Footnote 4:

"Che quello 'mperador che là su regna
Perch' i' fu'ribellante à la sua legge,
Non vuol che 'n sua città per me sì vegna." ]

[Footnote 5:

"Quale i fioretti dal notturno gelo
Chinati e chiusi, poi che 'l sol gl'imbianca,
Si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo."

Like as the flowers that with the frosty night
Are bowed and closed, soon as the sun returns,
Rise on their stems, all open and upright.]

[Footnote 6: This loss of intellectual good, and the confession of the poet that he finds the inscription over hell-portal hard to understand (_il senso lor m'è duro_), are among the passages in Dante which lead some critics to suppose that his hell is nothing but an allegory, intended at once to imply his own disbelief in it as understood by the vulgar part of mankind, and his employment of it, nevertheless, as a salutary check both to the foolish and the reflecting;--to the foolish, as an alarm; and to the reflecting, as a parable. It is possible, in the teeth of many appearances to the contrary, that such may have been the case; but in the doubt that it affects either the foolish or the wise to any good purpose, and in the certainty that such doctrines do a world of mischief to tender consciences and the cause of sound piety, such monstrous contradictions, in terms, of every sense of justice and charity which God has implanted in the heart of man, are not to be passed over without indignant comment.]

[Footnote 7: It is seldom that a boast of this kind--not, it must be owned, bashful--has been allowed by posterity to be just; nay, in four out of the five instances, below its claims.]

[Footnote 8:

"Genti v'eran, con occhi tardi e gravi,
Di grande autorita ne' lor sembianti
Parlavan rado, con voci soavi." ]

[Footnote 9: "Sopra 'l verde smalto." Mr. Cary has noticed the appearance, for the first time, of this beautiful but now commonplace image.]

[Footnote 10: "Il maestro di color che sanno."]

[Footnote 11: This is the famous episode of Paulo and Francesca. She was daughter to Count Guido da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, and wife to Giovanni Malatesta, one of the sons, of the lord of Rimini. Paulo was her brother-in-law. They were surprised together by the husband, and slain on the spot. Particulars of their history will be found in the Appendix, together with the whole original passage.

"Quali colombe, dal disio chiamate,
Con l'ali aperte e ferme, al dolce nido
Volan per l'aer dal voler portate

Cotali uscir de la schiera ov'è Dido,
A noi venendo per l'aer maligno,
Sì forte fu l'affettuoso grido."

As doves, drawn home from where they circled still,
Set firm their open wings, and through the air
Come sweeping, wafted by their pure good-will

So broke from Dido's flock that gentle pair,
Cleaving, to where we stood, the air malign,
Such strength to bring them had a loving prayer. ]

[Footnote 12: Francesca is to be conceived telling her story in anxious intermitting sentences--now all tenderness for her lover, now angry at their slayer; watching the poet's face, to see what he thinks, and at times averting her own. I take this excellent direction from Ugo Foscolo.]

[Footnote 13:

"Nessun maggior dolore,
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Ne la miseria." ]

[Footnote 14:

"Per più fiate gli occhi ci sospinse Quella lettura." "To look at one another," says Boccaccio; and his interpretation has been followed by Cary and Foscolo; but, with deference to such authorities, I beg leave to think that the poet meant no more than he says, namely, that their eyes were simply "suspended"--hung, as it were, over the book, without being able to read on; which is what I intended to express (if I may allude to a production of which both those critics were pleased to speak well), when, in my youthful attempt to enlarge this story, I wrote "And o'er the book they hung, and nothing said, And every lingering page grew longer as they read."

_Story of Rimini._]

[Footnote 15:

"Mentre che l'uno spirto questo disse,
L'altro piangeva sì, che di pietade
I' venni men così com'io morisse,
E caddi come corpo morto cade."

This last line has been greatly admired for the corresponding deadness of its expression.

While thus one spoke, the other spirit mourn'd
With wail so woful, that at his remorse
I felt as though I should have died. I turn'd
Stone-stiff; and to the ground, fell like a corse.

The poet fell thus on the ground (some of the commentators think) because he had sinned in the same way; and if Foscolo's opinion could be established--that the incident of the book is invention--their conclusion would receive curious collateral evidence, the circumstance of the perusal of the romance in company with a lady being likely enough to have occurred to Dante. But the same probability applies in the case of the lovers. The reading of such books was equally the taste of their own times; and nothing is more likely than the volume's having been found in the room where they perished. The Pagans could not be rebels to a law they never heard of, any more than Dante could be a rebel to Luther. But this is one of the absurdities with which the impious effrontery or scarcely less impious admissions of Dante's teachers avowedly set reason at defiance,--retaining, meanwhile, their right of contempt for the impieties of Mahometans and Brahmins; "which is odd," as the poet says; for being not less absurd, or, as the others argued, much more so, they had at least an equal claim on the submission of the reason; since the greater the irrationality, the higher the theological triumph.]

[Footnote 16: Plutus's exclamation about Satan is a great choke-pear to the commentators. The line in the original is

"Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe."

The words, as thus written, are not Italian. It is not the business of this abstract to discuss such points; and therefore I content myself with believing that the context implies a call of alarm on the Prince of Hell at the sight of the living creature and his guide.]

[Footnote 17: Phlegyas, a son of Mars, was cast into hell by Apollo for setting the god's temple on fire in resentment for the violation of his daughter Coronis. The actions of gods were not to be questioned, in Dante's opinion, even though the gods turned out to be false Jugghanaut is as good as any, while he lasts. It is an ethico-theological puzzle, involving very nice questions; but at any rate, had our poet been a Brahmin of Benares, we know how he would have written about it in Sanscrit.]

[Footnote 18: Filippo Argenti (Philip _Silver_,--so called from his shoeing his horse with the precious metal) was a Florentine remarkable for bodily strength and extreme irascibility. What a barbarous strength and confusion of ideas is there in this whole passage about him! Arrogance punished by arrogance, a Christian mother blessed for the unchristian disdainfulness of her son, revenge boasted of and enjoyed, passion arguing in a circle! Filippo himself might have written it. Dante says,

"Con piangere e con lutto
Spirito maladetto, ti rimani.
Via costà con gli altri cani," &c.

Then Virgil, kissing and embracing him,

"Alma sdegnosa
Benedetta colei che 'n te s'incinse," &c.

And Dante again,

"Maestro, molto sarei vago
Di vederlo attuffare in questa broda," &c. ]

[Footnote 19: Dis, one of the Pagan names of Pluto, here used for Satan. Within the walls of the city of Dis commence the punishments by fire.]

[Footnote 20: Farinata was a Ghibelline leader before the time of Dante, and had vanquished the poet's connexions at the battle of Montaperto.]

[Footnote 21: What would Guido have said to this? More, I suspect, than Dante would have liked to hear, or known how to answer. But he died before the verses transpired; probably before they were written; for Dante, in the chronology of his poem, assumes what times and seasons he finds most convenient.]

[Footnote 22:

"Sì che la pioggia non par che 'l maturi."

This is one of the grandest passages in Dante. It was probably (as English commentators have observed) in Milton's recollection when he conceived the character of Satan.]

[Footnote 23: The satire of friarly hypocrisy is at least as fine as Ariosto's discovery of Discord in a monastery.

The monster Geryon, son of Chrysaor (_Golden-sword_), and the Ocean-nymph Callirhoe (_Fair-flowing_), was rich in the possession of sheep. His wealth, and perhaps his derivatives, rendered him this instrument of satire. The monstrosity, the mild face, the glancing point of venom, and the beautiful skin, make it as fine as can be.]

[Footnote 24: "_Malebolge_," literally Evil-Budget. _Bolgia_ is an old form of the modern _baule_, the common term for a valise or portmanteau. "Bolgia" (says the _Vocabolario della Crusca, compendiato_, Ven. 1792), "a valise; Latin, bulga, hippopera; Greek, ippopetha [Greek]. In reference to valises which open lengthways like a chest, Dante uses the word to signify those compartments which he feigns in his Hell." (Per similitudine di quelle valigie, che s'aprono per lo lungo, a guisa di cassa, significa quegli spartimenti, che Dante finge nell' Inferno.) The reader will think of the homely figurative names in Bunyan, and the contempt which great and awful states of mind have for conventional notions of rank in phraseology. It is a part, if well considered, of their grandeur.]

[Footnote 25: Boniface the Eighth was the pope then living, and one of the causes of Dante's exile. It is thus the poet contrives to put his enemies in hell before their time.]

[Footnote 26: An allusion to the pretended gift of the Lateran by Constantine to Pope Sylvester, ridiculed so strongly by Ariosto and others.]

[Footnote 27: A truly infernal sentiment. The original is,

"Quì vive la pietà quand' è ben morta."
Here pity lives when it is quite dead.

"Chi è più scellerato," continues the poet, "di colui,
Ch'al giudicio divin passion porta."

That is: "Who is wickeder than he that sets his impassioned feelings against the judgments of God?" The answer is: He that attributes judgments to God which are to render humanity pitiless.]

[Footnote 28: _Ne' fianchi così poco_. Michael Scot had been in Florence; to which circumstance we are most probably indebted for this curious particular respecting his shape. The consignment of such men to hell is a mortifying instance of the great poet's participation in the vulgarest errors of his time. It is hardly, however, worth notice, considering what we see him swallowing every moment, or pretending to swallow.]

[Footnote 29: "Bonturo must have sold him something cheap," exclaimed a hearer of this passage. No:--the exception is an irony! There was not one honest man in all Lucca!]

[Footnote 30:

"Intorno si mira
Tutto smarrito da la grande angoscia
Ch'egli ha sofferta, e guardando sospira."

This is one of the most terribly natural pictures of agonised astonishment ever painted.]

[Footnote 31: I retain this passage, horrible as it is to Protestant ears, because it is not only an instance of Dante's own audacity, but a salutary warning specimen of the extremes of impiety generated by extreme superstition; for their first cause is the degradation of the Divine character. Another, no doubt, is the impulsive vehemence of the South. I have heard more blasphemies, in the course of half an hour, from the lips of an Italian postilion, than are probably uttered in England, by people not out of their senses, for a whole year. Yet the words, after all, were mere words; for the man was a good-natured fellow, and I believe presented no image to his mind of anything he was saying. Dante, however, would certainly not have taught him better by attempting to frighten him. A violent word would have only produced more violence. Yet this was the idle round which the great poet thought it best to run!]

[Footnote 32: Cianfa, probably a condottiere of Mrs. Radcliffe's sort, and robber on a large scale, is said to have been one of the Donati family, connexions of the poet by marriage.]

[Footnote 33: This, and the transformation that follows, may well excite the pride of such a poet as Dante; though it is curious to see how he selects inventions of this kind as special grounds of self-complacency. They are the most appalling ever yet produced.]

[Footnote 34: Guido, Conte di Montefeltro, a celebrated soldier of that day, became a Franciscan in his old age, in order to repent of his sins; but, being consulted in his cloister by Pope Boniface on the best mode of getting possession of an estate belonging to the Colonna family, and being promised absolution for his sins in the lump, including the opinion requested, he recommended the holy father to "promise much, and perform nothing" (_molto promettere, e nulla attendere_).]

[Footnote 35: Dolcino was a Lombard friar at the beginning of the fourteenth century, who is said to have preached a community of goods, including women, and to have pretended to a divine mission for reforming the church. He appears to have made a considerable impression, having thousands of followers, but was ultimately seized in the mountains where they lived, and burnt with his female companion Margarita, and many others. Landino says he was very eloquent, and that "both he and Margarita endured their fate with a firmness worthy of a better cause." Probably his real history is not known, for want of somebody in such times bold enough to write it.]

[Footnote 36: Literally, "under the breastplate of knowing himself to be pure:"

"Sotto l'osbergo del sentirsi pura."

The expression is deservedly admired; but it is not allowable in English, and it is the only one admitting no equivalent which I have met with in the whole poem. It might be argued, perhaps, against the perfection of the passage, that a good "conscience," and a man's "knowing himself to be pure," are a tautology; for Dante himself has already used that word;

"Conscienzia m'assicura;
La buona compagnia che l'uom francheggia
Sotto l'osbergo," &c.

But still we feel the impulsive beauty of the phrase; and I wish I could have kept it.]

[Foonote 37: This ghastly fiction is a rare instance of the meeting of physical horror with the truest pathos.]

[Footnote 38: The reader will not fail to notice this characteristic instance of the ferocity of the time.]

[Footnote 39: This is admirable sentiment; and it must have been no ordinary consciousness of dignity in general which could have made Dante allow himself to be the person rebuked for having forgotten it. Perhaps it was a sort of penance for his having, on some occasion, fallen into the unworthiness.]

[Footnote 40: By the Saracens in Roncesvalles; afterwards so favourite a topic with the poets. The circumstance of the horn is taken from the Chronicle of the pretended Archbishop Turpin, chapter xxiv.]

[Footnote 41: The gaping monotony of this jargon, full of the vowel _a_, is admirably suited to the mouth of the vast, half-stupid speaker. It is like a babble of the gigantic infancy of the world.]

[Footnote 42:

"Nè sì chinato li fece dimora,
E come albero in nave si levò."

A magnificent image! I have retained the idiomatic expression of the original, _raised himself_, instead of saying rose, because it seemed to me to give the more grand and deliberate image.]

[Footnote 43: Of "_màmma_" and "_bàbbo_," says the primitive poet. We have corresponding words in English, but the feeling they produce is not identical. The lesser fervour of the northern nations renders them, in some respects, more sophisticate than they suspect, compared with the "artful" Italians.]

[Footnote 44: Alessandro and Napoleon degli Alberti, sons of Alberto, lord of the valley of Falterona in Tuscany. After their father's death they tyrannised over the neighbouring districts, and finally had a mortal quarrel. The name of Napoleon used to be so rare till of late years, even in Italian books, that it gives one a kind of interesting surprise to meet with it.]

[Footnote 45:

"Se _voler_ fu, o destino o fortuna,
Non so."

What does the Christian reader think of that?]

[Footnote 46: Latrando.]

[Footnote 47: Bocca degli Abbati, whose soul barks like a dog, occasioned the defeat of the Guelfs at Montaperto, in the year 1260, by treacherously cutting off the hand of the standard-bearer.]

[Footnote 48: This is the famous story of Ugolino, who betrayed the castles of Pisa to the Florentines, and was starved with his children in the Tower of Famine.]

[Footnote 49: I should be loath to disturb the inimitable pathos of this story, if there did not seem grounds for believing that the poet was too hasty in giving credit to parts of it, particularly the ages of some of his fellow-prisoners, and the guilt of the archbishop. See the Appendix to this volume.]

[Footnote 50: This is the most tremendous lampoon, as far as I am aware, in the whole circle of literature.]

[Footnote 51: "Cortesia fu lui esser villano." This is the foulest blot which Dante has cast on his own character in all his poem (short of the cruelties he thinks fit to attribute to God). It is argued that he is cruel and false, out of hatred to cruelty and falsehood. But why then add to the sum of both? and towards a man, too, supposed to be suffering eternally? It is idle to discern in such barbarous inconsistencies any thing but the writer's own contributions to the stock of them. The utmost credit for right feeling is not to be given on every occasion to a man who refuses it to every one else.]

[Footnote 52: "La creatura ch'ebbe il bel sembiante."

This is touching; but the reader may as well be prepared for a total failure in Dante's conception of Satan, especially the English reader, accustomed to the sublimity of Milton's. Granting that the Roman Catholic poet intended to honour the fallen angel with no sublimity, but to render him an object of mere hate and dread, he has overdone and degraded the picture into caricature. A great stupid being, stuck up in ice, with three faces, one of which is yellow, and three mouths, each eating a sinner, one of those sinners being Brutus, is an object for derision; and the way in which he eats these, his everlasting _bonnes-bouches,_ divides derision with disgust. The passage must be given, otherwise the abstract of the poem would be incomplete; but I cannot help thinking it the worst anti-climax ever fallen into by a great poet.]

[Footnote 53: This silence is, at all events, a compliment to Brutus, especially from a man like Dante, and the more because it is extorted. Dante, no doubt, hated all treachery, particularly treachery to the leader of his beloved Roman emperors; forgetting three things; first, that Cæsar was guilty of treachery himself to the Roman people; second, that he, Dante, has put Curio in hell for advising Cæsar to cross the Rubicon, though he has put the crosser among the good Pagans; and third, that Brutus was educated in the belief that the punishment of such treachery as Cæsar's by assassination was one of the first of duties. How differently has Shakspeare, himself an aristocratic rather than democratic poet, and full of just doubt of the motives of assassins in general, treated the error of the thoughtful, conscientious, Platonic philosopher!]

[Footnote 54: At the close of this medley of genius, pathos, absurdity, sublimity, horror, and revoltingness, it is impossible for any reflecting heart to avoid asking, _Cui bono?_ What is the good of it to the poor wretches, if we are to suppose it true? and what to the world--except, indeed, as a poetic study and a warning against degrading notions of God--if we are to take it simply as a fiction? Theology, disdaining both questions, has an answer confessedly incomprehensible. Humanity replies: Assume not premises for which you have worse than no proofs.]