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copy, which he had requested might be on the poem's being terminated; or he ve corrected the imperfect Cantos, accordhe perfect (1). But there is no setting aside mstantial a recital as is given. It is then to a place among other antiquarian trifles; its authenticity should ever have been isputed can be well accounted for only from Density, which some have, to swell motes ms. To the Marquis Malaspina, as we are e Canticle of Purgatory was dedicated; but gatory must have been written, at earliest, Author had left Lunigiana (2): the Canticle aid to have been dedicated to Uguccione del ola, who was Podestà of Arezzo when Dante thither from Rome (3); so that this compliso dates subsequently (by at least 4 years) e's final departure from the person he comts. Wherefore, when we find the Paradise

piuto che fosse, pregò che adoperasse ch'egli l'avesse. Bib. - ut supra. Indeed the disappearance of those seven Cantos ger, than that of all of Dante's autographical writings. Of ely any are extant: whereas of Petrarch's and of Boccaccio's several. The present Marquis Malaspina has a multitude of cuments in his archives. His collection if accurately examined ould be a laborious undertaking might, perhaps, furnish imens of the hand-writing of Dante.

did so to go to Verona. Hell, Comment, Canto 1. p. 45. —

n. ec. p. 100.

502 He soon sought Pistoja. Hell, Comment, Canto vi. p. 366.

COMMENT

CANTO VIIT.

476 dedicated to Can, after the poet had abandoned Verona for ever (1): and when we learn that the entire Divine Comedy was dedicated to Frederick 1 of Sicily (2); a sovereign to whom its Author was once ambassador, but whom, during his exile, he must only for a very short time have visited, if he did so at all: such considerations imply, that our poet never dedicated a part of his great poem to any one to whom he left the power of repaying his homage by hospitality or any other vulgar reward. Indeed as to Faggiola and Can, the thing is yet more striking: for his dedications to them were made, not only after he had left them, but after he had been obliged to leave them by

(1) Concerning the close of the Divine Comedy, there is some fable. One of Dante's sons imagined his father's ghost appeared to him, and showed him the secret drawer in which the last thirteen Cantos of Paradise were to be found. This might have been a sick fancy of the young man; or at worst an invention of filial devotion. It however clearly proves, that the Cantos in question were posthumously published. The composition of Paradise theu occupied the last years of Dante, and these he past in Ravenna. In Ravenna therefore he wrote the dedication of Paradise. Indeed as the poem (at least the whole of it) was not sent to Can before Dante's death, it is most probable Dante had never sent him the dedication, though composed and ready to be sent; and this suggestion of mine is much strengthened by the fact of the dedication being without a date, though in the form of a letter; while all the other letters which we have of Dante are scrupulously dated.

(2) This is the way to take all discordance from Boccaccio's words; without blaming him, as Pelli does (Mem. ec. p. 144). Boccaccio says (Vita di Dante p. 259), Paradise was dedicated to Frederick; and the whole Divine Comedy, to Can. Either Boccaccio wrote one thing for another, in the burry of composition; or his copiers, in copying. He must have known Paradise was dedicated to Can; for he had seen the dedication, and translated it, verbatim. Hell, Comment, Canto 1. p. 63.

CANTO VI.

their own ill-treatment of him. How much he had to complain of the latter, I have already shown : and as to the former, a contemporary chronicler affirms, that his conduct became so indecent towards all the White refugees, that they found themselves constrained to quit Arezzo; adding, that the corrupt change was produced by the delusive hope of having his son made Cardinal by Dante's implacable foe, Boniface vin (1). I may there. fore repeat my former words, that, with an admirable spirit of independence Dante shrunk from owing any thing to men, from whom he had experienced unkindness, and whom he was determined never to revisit; and so repaid a hundred. fold whatever favours had been received from them, by attaching their names in front of Canticles of his immortal work (2).'

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'So I, turning to the sea of all wisdom' is the text; and it is a bold and most Dantesque manner of designating Virgil. Indeed the variety of appellations which he is given is a distinguishing trait of the Divine Comedy. No writer of verse or prose

(1) Corrotto da vana speranza datagli da Papa Bonifazio di fare uno suo figliuolo Cardinale, fece loro tante ingiurie che loro convenne partirsi. Dino Compagni, Lib. a. p. 50. Recollect, Dante was one of their chief Governors; so he must have had a full share of the Po. desta's injustice. The White Chiefs staid only a few weeks in Arezzo. (2) Hell, Comment, Canto 1. P. 50.

478

COMMENT

CANTO VI17.

in any language (not even Mr. Gibbon) rivals its fertility in this particular (1).

C. -XIX.

The fable of Phlegyas in Polytheism, and the beautiful story of the sacrifice of Isaac in the Hebrew law, were intended (however dissimilar in their modes and merits) to convey a similar mo ral unqualified obedience to Providence. For a most loving father to slay with his own hand his young, innocent, lovely boy, were at least as heartrending as to submit to the violation of a daughter. The Pagans selected the latter example; and if the Bible, which preferred the former, represented it as put into execution too, we might for once hold, that, of the two creeds, Paganism seemed to display the milder spirit. Our religion vindicates its usual superiority of chaste feeling. Phlegyas was a king of Thessaly, whose child was ravished by Apollo; on which the repining father revenged himself in the only way he could devise against a Celestial, and set fire to the Temple at Delphos - perhaps hoping to starve the Deity (as Aristophanes profanely declared might be ) by depriving him of the fume of altar offerings (2).

(1) Mr. Cary, as afraid of the boldness of the expression, replaces it with the common-place one → "turning to the deep source of knowledge." Yet mar di tutto'l senno has, I know not what of peculiar poignancy; which a literal version best conveys.

(2) The same conclusion follows from the theories of Jerome and Origen; who held the Pagan Deities to be bad angels. Hell, Comment, Canto 1. p. 179. Note.

CANTO VIII.

But Apollo shot him dead for his temerity; and his soul was hurled to the Tartarean abyss, as an admonition to man that true justice is not what appears such in his eyes, but what is ordained by the Divinity:

Phlegyasque miserrimus omnes

Admonet, et magnâ testatur voce per umbras:
Discite justitiam moniti, et non temnere Divos (1).

(1) Aeneid. Lib. vi. v. 618.- I know that both a French wit and the Bishop of Gloucester objected to this exclamation of Phlegyas; and that the Bishop employed it as a prop to his hypothesis—an hypothesis that melts away before plain sense. "In the midst of his torments" (Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works, Vol. 1v. p. 510) “the unfortunate Phlegyas preaches justice and piety, like Ixion in Pindar. A very useful piece of advice, says the French buffoon, for those who were alrea dy damned to all eternity:

Cette sentence est bonne et belle:

Mais en enfer, de quoi sert-elle ?

From this judicious piece of criticism his lordship argues, that Phlegyas was preaching not to the dead, but to the living: and that Virgil is only describing the mimic Tartarus, which was exhibited at Eleusis for the instruction of the initiated. I shall transcribe one or two of the reasons, which Dr. Jortin condescends to oppose to Scarron's criticism. • To preach to the damned, says he, is labour in vain. And what if it is? This admonition, as far as it relates to himself and his companions in misery, is not so much as an admonition to mend, as a bitter sarcasm, etc. It is labour in vain. But in the poetical system it seems to have been the occupation of the damned to labour in vain.' " That Dante, though living in the age of the love of allegory and indeed rather over-inclined to it himself, never does Virgil the injustice of attributing to him any other allegorical project, than that of inculcating the doctrine of the religion of his time as to futurity, by the ima gery with which that religion was conversant, I have said elsewhere. (Hell, Comment, Canto 111. p. 162.) Aeneas's descent to the shades was in Dante's opinion intended to appear as real as any poetic fiction can be. Whence to the tenderness and sublimity of poetry, is added most interesting information as to the creed of Paganism. What would it all shrink to under the Warburtonian process? But it is a hopeless cause. Warburton and Scarron; against Gibbon, Jortin, and Dante!

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