would throw aside such a tale in incredulous disgust, unless it were told with the strongest air of veracity, with a sobriety even in its horrors, with the greatest precision and multiplicity in its details. The narrative of Milton in this respect differs from that of Dante, as the adventures of Amadis differ from those of Gulliver. Poetry which relates to the beings of another world ought to be at once mysterious and picturesque. That of Milton is so. That of Dante is picturesque indeed beyond any that ever was written. Its effect approaches to that produced by the pencil or the chisel. But it is picturesque to the exclusion of all mystery. This is a fault on the right side, a fault inseparable from the plan of Dante's poem, which, as we have already observed, rendered the utmost accuracy of description necessary. Still it is a fault. The supernatural agents excite an interest; but it is not the interest which is proper to supernatural agents. We feel that we could talk to the ghosts and demons without any emotion of unearthly awe. We could, like Don Juan, ask them to supper, and eat heartily in their company. Dante's angels are good men with wings. His devils are spiteful, ugly executioners. His dead men are merely living men in strange situations. The scene which passes between the poet and Farinata is justly celebrated. Still, Farinata in the burning tomb is exactly what Farinata would have been at an auto da fe. Nothing can be more touching than the first interview of Dante and Beatrice. Yet what is it but a lovely woman chiding, with sweet, austere composure, the lover for whose affection she is grateful, but whose vices she reprobates? The feelings which give the passage its charm would suit the streets of Florence as well as the summit of the Mount of Purgatory. THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S. Leigh Hunt's Stories from the Italian Poets. Dante entitled the saddest poem in the world a Comedy, because it was written in a middle style; though some, by a strange confusion of ideas, think the reason must have been because it "ended happily!" that is, because beginning with hell (to some), it terminated with "heaven" (to others). As well might they have said, that a morning's work in the Inquisition ended happily, because, while people were being racked in the dungeons, the officers were making merry in the drawing-room. For the much-injured epithet "Divine," Dante's memory is not responsible. He entitled his poem, arrogantly enough, yet still not with that impiety of arrogance, "The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by nation, but not by habits." The word "divine" was added by some transcriber; and it heaped absurdity on absurdity, too much of it, alas! being literally infernal tragedy. I am not speaking in mockery, any further than the fact itself cannot help so speaking, I respect what is to be respected in Dante; I admire in him what is admirable; would love (if his infernalities would let me) what is lovable; but this must not hinder one of the human race from protesting against what is erroneous in his fame, when it jars against every best feeling, human and divine. Mr. Cary thinks that Dante had as much right to avail himself of "the popular creed in all its extravagance," as Homer had of his gods, or Shakespeare of his fairies. But the distinction is obvious. Homer did not personally identify himself with a creed, or do his utmost to perpetuate the worst parts of it in behalf of a ferocious, inquisitorial church, and to the risk of endangering the peace of millions of gentle minds. The great poem thus misnomered is partly a system of theology, partly an abstract of the knowledge of the day, but chiefly a series of passionate and imaginative pictures, altogether forming an account of the author's times, his friends, his enemies, and himself, written to vent the spleen of his exile, and the rest of his feelings, good and bad, and to reform Church and State by a spirit of resentment and obloquy, which highly needed reform itself. It has also a design strictly self-referential. The author feigns that the beatified spirit of his mistress has obtained leave to warn and purify his soul by showing him the state 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 feel ings to this effect even now among the peasantry of Italy; where, the reader need not be told, Pagan customs of all 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 censor'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 melancholy; 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 its smiles and its beatitude; but always excepting the poetry, especially the similes brought from the more heavenly earth,-we realise little but a fantastical assemblage of doctors and doubtful characters, far more angry and theological than celestial; giddy raptures of monks and inquisitors dancing in circles, and saints denouncing popes and Florentines; in short, a heaven libelling itself with invectives against earth, and terminating in a great presumption. The people of Sienna, according to this national and Christian poet, were a parcel of coxcombs; those of Arezzo, dogs; and of Casentino, hogs. Lucca made a trade of perjury. Pistoia was a den of beasts, and ought to be reduced to ashes; and the river Arno should overflow and drown every soul in Pisa. Almost all the women in Florence walked half naked in public, and were abandoned in private. Every brother, husband, son, and father, in Bologna, set their women to sale. In all Lombardy were not to be found three men who were not rascals; and in Genoa and Romagna people went about pretending to be men, but in reality were bodies inhabited by devils, their souls having gone to the "lowest pit of hell" to join the betrayers of their friends and kinsmen. Milton has spoken of the "milder shades of Purgatory;" and truly they possess great beauties. Even in a theological point of view they are something like a bit of Christian refreshment after the horrors of the Inferno. The first emerging from the hideous gulf to the sight of the blue serenity of heaven is painted in a manner inexpressibly charming. So is the sea-shore with the coming of the angel; the valley, with the angels in green; the repose at night on the rocks; and twenty other pictures of gentleness and love. And yet special and great has been the escape of the Protestant world from this part of Roman Catholic belief; for Purgatory is the heaviest stone that hangs upon the neck of the old and feeble in that communion. Hell is avoidable by repentance; but Purgatory what modest conscience shall escape? Mr. Cary, in a note on a passage in which Dante recommends his readers to think on what follows this So much for his beloved countrymen. expiatory state, rather than what is suf- As for foreigners, particularly kings, fered there, looks upon the poet's injunc- Edward the First of England and Robert tion as an "unanswerable objection to of Scotland were a couple of grasping the doctrine of purgatory," it being dif- fools; the Emperor Albert was ficult to conceive "how the best can usurper; Alphonso the Second of Spain, meet death without horror, if they believe a debauchee; the King of Bohemia, a it must be followed by immediate and coward; Frederick of Aragon, a coward intense suffering." Luckily, assent is and miser; the Kings of Portugal and not belief; and mankind's feelings are Norway, forgers; the King of Naples, a for the most part superior to their opi-man whose virtues were expressed by a nions; otherwise the world would have been in a bad way indeed, and Nature not been vindicated of her children. But let us watch and be on our guard against all resuscitations of superstition. As to our Florentine's Heaven, it is full of beauties also, though sometimes of a more questionable and pantomimical sort than is to be found in either of the other books. I shall speak of some of them presently; but the general impression of the place is, that it is no heaven at all. He says it is, and talks much of an unit, and his vices by a million; and the King of France, the descendant of a Paris butcher, and of progenitors who poisoned St. Thomas Aquinas, their descendants conquering with the arms of Judas rather than of soldiers, and selling the flesh of their daughters to old men, in order to extricate themselves from a danger. But truly it is said, that, when Dante is great, nobody surpasses him. I doubt if anybody equals him, as to the constant intensity and incessant variety of his pic ILLUSTRATIONS. 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. portionate to that of his angels, almost Dante's grandeur of every kind is proto his ferocity; and that is saying every thing. It is not always the spiritual grandeur of Milton, the subjection of the Ginguéné has remarked the singular is equally such when he chooses, and far material impression to the moral; but it variety, as well as beauty, of Dante's more abundant. angels. Milton's, indeed, are common--his black whirlwinds-his innumerable His infernal precipices place in the comparison. In the eighth cries and claspings of hands-his very canto of the Inferno, the devils insolently odours of huge loathsomeness-his giants refuse the poet and his guide an entrance at twilight standing up to the middle in into the city of Dis. An angel comes pits, like towers, and causing earthquakes sweeping over the Stygian lake to en- when they move--his earthquake of the force it; the noise of his wings makes mountain in Purgatory, when a spirit is the shores tremble, and is like a crashing set free for heaven-his dignified Mantuan whirlwind, such as beats down the trees Sordello, silently regarding him and his and sends the peasants and their herds guide as they go by, "like a lion on his flying before it. The heavenly messenger, watch" 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 - lying in unconquered rage and sullenness his blasphemer, Capaneus, under an eternal rain of flakes of fire (human precursor of Milton's Satan)— his aspect of Paradise, had smiled" "as if the universe whole planet Saturn crying out so loud, his inhabitants of the in accordance with the anti-Papal indignation 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 DANTE AND TACITUS. By Rev. H. H. Milman, History of Latin 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 name. 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 creation 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, peculiar, 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 jus tice, and of public affairs. No doubt it sprung, though its affiliation is by no means clear, out of the universal dege. nerate 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 |