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COMMENT

CANTO .

me enim rei familiaris angustia; ut hæc et alia utilia rei publicæ derelinquere oporteat () are his expressions: and they probably allude to the necessity of supporting himself by his diplomatic exertions, which curtailed much of his time and indeed, finally, his life, for it was the fatigue of his last vexatious embassy that killed him. Maffei ought rather to have remarked, that this document displays, not the magnificence of the Veronese, but Dante's admirable spirit of independance, which shrunk from remaining indebted to a man from whom he had experienced unkindness and whom he was determined never to revisit and so repaid a hundred-fold whatever favours he had accepted from that Ducal minor, or his father and brothers, by attaching the name of Scala in front of the sublimest Canticle of his immortal work. Such an observation were the more applicable, from independance being one of those mental features which distinguish Dante among the votaries of Parnassus. Homer, it has been justly observed, is a national poet; Virgil, Ariosto and Tasso, courtly ones. These wrote to flatter the Cæsars, and the house of Este; but the Grecian, to celebrate the whole of Greece. Our Milton and Dante were even more universal and independent than Homer; for their compositions were to panegyrise no single nation; but to treat of topics nearly

(1) Dedic. p. 38.

BANTO I.

equally interesting to all mankind. The Tuscan indeed often speaks of Florence, but such bursts of patriotism are rather accidental elucidations of the main subject, than any essential part of it. They are rarely flattering; and, in comparison with the whole poem, are both short and few: while as to the Paradise lost, I think, it does not contain one passage exclusively directed to England. If Can's largesses were (as is ridiculously pretended) the only cure for Dante's avarice, it was a desperate case. Nor was the prediction of that leader's political prowess any better founded, than of his domestic generosity. Far from curbing the licentiousness of the Papal power in any way, (to say nothing of chasing it from 'State to State' and freeing fair, fallen Italia) he consumed his life in bacchanal frivolity, and is to thank the Dante, whom his coarseness had dared insult, if his fame now extends beyond the local chronicles of a provincial

Poor Dante's presages were,

were, almost all, to be contradicted by the event: a circumstance that might have spared his answering to a charge of proficiency in judicial astrology. That portion of Italy, for which Nisus, Euryalus, Turnus and Camilla fell, was precisely the Papal territory; and this exact designation of it corroborates, more and more, my argument of the she wolf's meaning the ava

ral usurpations was so far from taking place, that, of all the despotisms from the Alps to Sicily, the district whose regeneration he predicted, was precisely the one that was to groan most hopelessly: and was shortly to be so reduced, as to regret even its tyrant; who, leaving it in total anarchy, deserted to Avignon.

It is surely strange that we should dwell so much more forcibly on the shades of distinction between our opinions, than on the wide group of such as are common to us all. There seem to be no doctrines more contradictory than fate and freewill, for on none philosophers and divines have disputed with greater warmth: yet Cicero, with a little temper and logic, reduces the reasonable members of both parties to a confession that their only disagreement is in words, and that they are all substantially of one opinion (1). If that be the case in a controversy wherein at first view the contrast appears as strong as that between light and darkness, how much more must it be so in one which does not present even the appearance of important dissimilarities? Yet men seem to have acted on other principles, and often to have combated most inhumanly on the most frivolous pretences. Thus, two Orien

(1) De fato p. XIX.

CANTO 1.

tal sects are said to have waged bitter war from a difference about washing their hands, les uns disant qu'il faut verser l'eau dans le creux de la main en la faisant couler le long du bras jusqu'au coude, et les autres qu'il faut au contraire jeter l'eau dans la jointure du bras et la faire couler en bas jusqu'à l'extrémité des doigts (1). Not only all Christians, but the principal framers of every system of ethics and religion, agree in this, that there is an Almighty Creator, with whom the virtuous are to enjoy eternal happiness, and from whom the wicked are to be banished for ever and consequently to be, in some way or other, for ever miserable. This sentence- the substance of which remains untouched, whatever phraseology be employed, God, virtue or principle of good, or Satan, vice, or evil principle comprises the entire subject of the poem on which we are entering: and the last words of it that of the present Canticle, or rather of the largest portion of it, as shall be shown and whether we call it 'Hell-of-thedamned' or Tartarus or Gehenna, it is still the selfsame thing, —a place of everlasting woe believed in, with amazing unity, by the greatest law-givers, theologians and poets, from Moses and Homer down to Milton, and by the mightiest philosophers from Zeno and Socrates down to Newton; with the almost single exception of a few Epicureans,

(1) Hist. Mod. de Maury . V. 4. p. 338.

were more remarkable, their unworthy morais or their ignorance and imbecility (). Amongst the Greeks, Romans, Jews, Christians and others, fire is principally, but not exclusively, represented as the instrument of future punishment: while the Magians reject it altogether, apparently from respect to that element, and the Mahommedans, for the most part, substitute cold in its stead, (2) a theory much followed by Dante and probably taken from the Koran with which book he appears to have been familiar, as I shall explain hereafter. But whatever be the station assigned, whether in the bowells of the earth, or in the viewless void, or beyond both space and time, or whatever be the tortures depicted, they, by all the religions I have noticed, are used as allegorical, and as finite representations of that which is infinite: whether flames, frost, vultures, hippocentaurs, chimæras, Styx, hunger, thirst, stench, serpents, dragons, or brimstone be employed; or it more than realise all these, to describe the bad spirit as cursed with the conscious horrors of her own identity; the same things are evidently signified, things of which we can have no conception, although our reason acknowledgeth their necessary existence; material substances that figure immaterial ones, and that would therefore be erroneous pictures, if, during

(1) Nat. Deor. l. 1. p. 44. (2) Sale. p. 124.

Divin. 1. 1. p. 3.