CANTO II.

the course he had to steer, and what conflicting factions were to assail him, he must have foreseen; and he consequently employed every means that prudence could suggest to prepare for them,-but not successfully. It is the fate of most men, who write reasonably on a party question, to offend both sides; and they ought never to flatter themselves that they can attain any other recompense, than that of their own consciences and the assent of posterity. Present passions are against them; and the unimpassioned are too few and too quiet to be heard. But, above all mankind, this remark applies to Dante; who, in the most distempered age, undertook to discuss impartially the two most momentous and inflammatory of subjects, religion and politics: so that it is no wonder his character should be misunderstood abroad, when it was exposed to worse reproach at home; where his countrymen (however they may have extolled his speculative theology and his verses) only now slowly begin to do him some little justice as a political moralist; although he is certainly still more admirable in this latter character, than in that of poet. But, in order to curtail the argument, I beg of the reader (whatever may have been his habits of thinking) to concede for a while that our Author's objects were to panegyrize Christianity (or indeed rather the form of Christianity professed by Catholics (1) ) and to advocate freedom; and,

(1) Fu il nostro Dante nasconditore di così cara gioja come è la

-

CANTO IF.

I dare believe, one will of himself adopt a similar opinion before proceeding far in these comments. It were superfluous to dwell upon the enormous abuses which had crept into the Roman Church (I pretend not to affirm in matter of faith, but, at least, of discipline) during some centuries, abuses that, about the thirteenth, had attained their most crying excess. Even all Catholic historians agree in this; and vie in their abhorrence of a Pope's kicking off the diadem of a kneeling Emperor: no Sovereign secure, allegiance held sacred. no where, « the papal power » the papal power » (in Mr. Hume's words) was now at its summit in every kingdom of Europe (1). » At this period did Dante take up his pen against enormities which he deemed still more disgraceful to religion, than subversive of the civil rights of nations: and that his exertions were soon fruitful, is manifest from another passage in Mr. Hume, who says that Boniface (the very Pope against whom Dante wrote) << was among the latest of the sovereign Pontifts that exercised an authority over the temporal af. fairs of Princes (2). » No doubt, but even a more substantial fabrick than one raised on mere opinion fama potentiæ non sua vi nixæ might melt away before less obstacles, than the varied

Cattolica verità sorto volgare corteccia nel suo poema. Bocc. Comento. vol. 1. p. 56.

(1) Hist. vol. 2. p. 510.

(2) Id vol. 3. p. 86.

CANTO II.

exertions of one of the greatest geniuses that has existed. Incalculable benefits thence accrued to society; but he himself lived not to witness them; for on him personally the controversy heaped calamities nearly as incalculable, the loss of home, fortune, friends, repose and health - leaving him no other consolation, than that of Milton for the sacrifice of his eyes:

Yet I argue not

Against heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?———
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In liberty's defence, my noble task (1).

He sets out then by terming the Papal, a holy throne; and the Pope, the legitimate successor of S. Peter: in which he asserts the belief of Catholics. And these reverential expressions agree with many others of the same nature up and down through all his works: so that, when even that wicked Boniface, whose name he introduces so horridly in the infernal gulf,

Se' tu già costi ritto

Se' tu già costì ritto Bonifazio? (2)

and indeed against whom he thunders unremittingly, is ignominiously put in prison by Sciarra Colonna, the poet, forgetting every thing else, and as if only alive to the insult done to the head of his

(1) Sonnet. XVII

(2) Inf. Canto XIX.

CANTO II.

church, and turning from a consideration of the unworthiness of the occupant, to horror at the impious attack upon the station, pronounces a malediction on the perpetrators of the sacrilege, and represents Christ himself as crucified anew in the person of his high-priest :

I see my Jesus mocked again

And drench'd again with vinegar and gall
And amid living robbers slain (1).

No doubt, he felt that the impiety of the Pope was
no excuse for that of the assassins. Besides all
which, he was so persuaded of the truth of his
own Creed, and so scrupulously desirous of mani-
festing that persuasion, that he composed a para-
phrastic version of the whole Roman Catechism,
to accompany this poem; along with which we
find it bound up in the earliest printed editions (2).
Having thus shielded himself against attacks on
his orthodoxy, he set out boldly on the achieve-
ment to which he seems to have thought it pro-
per to dedicate, in a particular manner, his life
and writings
to distinguish between the
authorities spiritual and temporal, and to repro-
bate the Papal pretensions to this latter, as an
unchristian usurpation. It were necessary to
transport ourselves far back, to evils now lost in
time, if we would form a correct idea of the dif
ficulties of his undertaking. Almost all other re-

(1) Purg. Canto xx.

(2) Venezia, Vendelin da Spira 1477.

CANTO II.

formers have permitted themselves to be impelled by circumstances somewhat beyond the limit, which their cool judgments had at first traced out: but he, without once swerving, continued on his work so steadily true to his ecclesiastical tenets, -justum et tenacem propositi virumthat this poem has defied the most microscopic inquisition; and, with all its severity against the Roman See, no Pope has, I believe, ever ventured to insert it in the nearly endless Index of condemned books. Yet surely nothing can be more tremendous than its denunciations. The opposer of every servitude, Dante was peculiarly so of the one which was the worst, because the most feared and the most general; other despotisms left at least part of society free, and, if there were multitudes of slaves, there were many masters also: but that of the Papacy spared no one, and kings and subjects were equally degraded by it. In assailing it, he felt he was on perilous ground; and that conviction buoyed him up to a constancy and fearlessness that must have seemed nearly supernatural to his contemporaries. A lion exulting in his strength, a Hercules redoubling his strokes on the hydra, he at last came off complete victor. But it required an implacable perseverance; and, in proceeding, even we, perhaps, shall be astonished at such inextinguishable animosity contempt, irony, invective, (not only in Hell and Purgatory, but in the very Holy-of-holies, teh most sacred precincts