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CANTO VI.

Scriptural sense we are to receive this word, glut tony; and then it signifies much more those who delight in delicate living, than such as exceed in the quota of what they devour; it is the former who make a God of their belly; and mere voracity of stomach can rarely be dangerous to individuals, and never to the State. Dante follows the phraseology of his Church; which, including various costly trappings of life in a single word, stigmatises undue indulgence in all, or any, of them as being comprised in that one of the seven deadly sins, gluttony. It is curious to consider how many philosophers and legislators (though disagreeing in other points) agree in this of employing regulations about food, as the means of restraining the inordinate passions of man. Such restraints seem superfluous. This however was not the opinion of some of the wisest individuals of our species: so that we find almost all the leading religions of the world, Pythagoreans, Magi, Mahometans, Jews, Catholics, prescribing fasts and prohibiting certain meats and beverages. This uniformity of legislation argues some powerful and uniform principle with which the laws had to contend: and we discover it in the tendency which individuals, and therefore nations, have to slide on from pleasure to excess; until what was despised becoming desired, and superfluities becoming necessaries, the mind is brought down from her ' pride of place' to a base subserviency to the body; whence both body and

GANTO VT.

mind become rapidly weakened, and, mutually destroying each other, are at length rendered utterly incapable of any thing heroic either in action

or in sentiment. It has been the fate of the most renowned States. Yet how little contents nature! It is our unnatural passions that are insatiable: and as these gather, strength from indulgence, the votary of Circe is, by a second transformation, turned into a malefactor. Hence our poet does not find in this circle, as he expected, those whom he knew as luxurious characters on earth; but learns that they are occupants of deeper, direr dens 'as having committed crimes of much greater malignity. One unfortunate, Florentine gentleman is an exception; and he (though he may regard his escape from worse wickedness and pangs as lucky, and the tears with which Dante honours him as a compliment) is in a sorry plight. He had been an amiable, boon companion; and he is selected on this occasion, to show that the mis demeanor in question, besides that it usually leads to the deadliest vices, is in itself so hateful to Providence, that a course of jollity and banqueting (even when not followed by more criminal disorders is sure to conduct to abjection and misery. It is hard to say whether intemperance be more infamous, or more perilous : envy may spring from lofty conceptions, and even avarice from a desire of riches as instrumental of something great; but there is little or nothing to pal

CANTO VI.

liate the infamy of intemperance: and when men are reduced by it to the level of brutes they usually sink below them, and hurry from the licentious board into outrageous guilt and peril, civil anarchy, murder, atheism. The picture drawn by Boccaccio of the profligate intemperance of Florence, if it be in the least correct (as I presume there is no doubt but it is, since it was composed to be exhibited to the Florentines themselves ), proves both that Dante's remonstrances were as unattended to as those of Cassandra, and portends the fast dissolution of the corrupt republic. 'Here' (cries Boccaccio) 'are to be seen suppers consisting of luxuries drawn from the most distant countries; on the same table fish from the Atlantic Ocean, and from the Red sea, and wildfowl brought from beyond the Alps; so that the repasts of our private citizens far surpass those known at any court in Europe, not excepting even that of the Emperor's or the Pope's. That those feasts always end in drunkenness and riot, is bad; but a much worse evil is, that such festive hours are selected for consulting about the weightiest affairs of the Commonwealth. Thus these are too often decided on by men out of their senses; as the world may surmise from the measures it sees adopted and their consequences (1).' If the last Canto was written partly, or perhaps principally, through mo

(1) Comento, Vol. 1. p. 372.

CANTO VI.

tives of private friendship, this one and all those that are to follow spring from genuine patriotism and love of justice. But luxury and intemperance were not to be checked; in a few years Florence annihilated her aristocracy, and, instead of nobles and commoners, she became divided into the bribed and the bribers; on the money-market, not the field of battle, the Tuscans henceforth calculated for power and protection; so that the time came, when a merchant becoming master of the money market, bought and sold them all at plea

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Cerberus hæc ingens latratu regna trifauci
Personat, adverso recubans immanis in antro,
Cui vates, horrere videns jam colla colubris,
Melle soporatam et medicatis frugibus offam
Objicit: ille, fame rabidâ tria guttura pandens,
Corripit objectam (1).

It is unnecessary to remark more on this introduc tion of the Virgilian Cerberus, than that Dante gives it a somewhat less definite shape; by which it is rendered fitter for admittance as an allegorical demon into a Christian poem. In the Aeneid, the hell-dog is a watch; here, he is rather a tormenting fiend in the former, his watchfulness is the quality that is most dwelt upon; in the latter, it is his cruel voracity.

(1) Aeneid, Lib. v1. v. 417.

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Il gran vermo, 'the huge worm' is Scriptural; and is introduced again by Dante in his translation of the sixth psalm defend me, O Lord, from the huge worm! (1) Some may consider this expression taken from Alberic's vision, a monkish rhapsody ridiculously extolled as the origin of the Divine Comedy; for that Dante had perused it may be true, (although there is no testimony proving any such thing) but that he could have gleaned any useful hints from that unreadable foolery, will not, I am sure, be allowed by any reasonable man who examines it. The passage to which I just now allude, is indeed the only tolerable one in it: 'at the entrence of hell I beheld a worm of infinite magnitude tied by a mighty chain, and it seemed that, that chain was fastened to another head with. in-side of hell. And before the mouth of the worm stood a multitude of souls, all of whom were sucked in like so many flies when he inhaled his breath; and when he breathed from him, they rushed out again half-burned, like a shower of sparks. By this penalty are fulfilled the words of

(1) Defendimi, o Signor, dallo gran Vermo. p. 19. Shakespere uses the word twice as synonimous with serpent- "The mortal worm might make the sleep eternal". (Henry v1. Part. 2. Act. 3. v. 467 ) "Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus here?" Ant. and Cleop. Act. 5. v. 376) ~“ worm” ( says Johnson, Com.to Id. ) " is the Teutonic for serpent, and the Norwegians call a huge monster sometimes seen in the nothern sea, the sea worm.

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