CANTO VIII. in any language (not even Mr. Gibbon) rivals its fertility in this particular (1). 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 moral 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 u. p. 179. Note. CANTO VI. 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: (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. iv. 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 already 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! CANTO VII2. How frigid and repulsive is this, to the parable of Genesis! The destruction of a costly edifice, even the poetical recollections awakened by 'Smintheus of the silver bow' are tame and weak, in comparison with such a sublime appeal to the best and warmest feelings of our nature the parental . - entire Yet both inculcate the same lesson submission to the divine dispensations, from a firm conviction that they must be equitable. Phlegyas was punished for vain resistance; Abraham rewarded for all-confiding deference. It may at first sight appear the prime defect of the fable of Paganism, that Apollo, and not the supreıne Divinity is the acting power: but, in truth, it is chiefly defective not on this score, but on that of the coldness with which it applies to our affections. It is a reproach to which every part of the Pagan worship is liable, that of being too susceptible of misconstruction and of consequently giving easily rise to gross superstitions among the vulgar superstitions, which (as I have said in the words of Dante (i) neither the founders of that worship, nor any of its enlightened professors ever intended. If by Apollo was understood one of the minor Deities, these were no more than subordinate ministers in the Platonic creed, as Angels are in ours; and an instructed Roman should not have heard with more admiration of Apollo working the (1) Comment, Canto v11. p. 441. CANTO VI11. will of the Great First Cause, than a Christian of it's being an Angel of the Lord, not the Lord himself, who arrested the sacrifice which the Lord in person had. commanded - “ Gon did tempt Abraham and said unto him Abraham... take thy son, thy only son, Isaac, and offer him for a burnt offering .... and Abraham bound Isaac ...and laid him on the altar, and took the knife to slay him ... and the Angel of Lord called out to him... Abraham, Abraham, lay not thine hand upon the lad, etc. (1)." Or, if a Pagan preferred attaching his mind to no secondary intelligence, but to the universal Jehovah -to no Angel or Deity of the Lord, but the Lord himself there was nothing to prevent his doing so; for Macrobius has shown at length, that Apollo, or the sun, was frequently employed as one of the many synonimes which have served in various times and countries to designate one and the same Being (maximus Jupiter), the king of Gods ( Rex Deorum ), the Parent of all things divine as well as human (2). It is not in its substance, but manner (ill calculated to attain its end of bettering mankind), that the story of Phlegyas and Apollo is open to criticism; and marks, as clearly as any passage of which I am aware, the immense superiority of the Biblical over the Heathen doctors. For here is the self-same thesis exemplified by each of them according to their peculiar genius (1) Genesis, xx11, 1-19. (2) Eundem esse Jovem ac Solem claris docetur indiciis.Sat. l. 1. c. 23. CANTO VIII. by these in a manner that shocks, and by those that softens the heart: by these with a tale of rashness, revenge and sacrilege, of the violation of a virgin (which it required an effort of the understanding to convince men was not unholy, because ordained by heaven) and of the exasperation and eternal punishment of her father; the justice of which punishment, and the injustice of which exasperation could only be drawn from a metaphysical process too fine for popular comprehensions: and by those with a drama of most gratifying pathos, whose catastrophe was the dispersion of every fear and the crowning of every hope. What more venerably moving, than Abraham's unruffled faith and tenderness? "and Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it upon Isaac, his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. " I know of no scene more profoundly affecting. And when the juvenile victim, with a look of soul-reposing, filial devotion, interrogates his hoary sire, who but sheds a tender tear? "And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, my father: and he said, here I am my son. And he said, behold the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" Has another mortal dramatist ever represented a parent in a situation more truly pathetic? Or can any thing be conceived more touchingly sublime, than the inly-bleeding parent's simple response? My son, God will himself 66 |