Even at this point, Satan had not sunk so low but that he could discern the supreme charm of goodness and virtue, and see down into the depths of his own loss.

But one step further, and the Archangel becomes the Devil. As he approaches Eve, on the day of the great Temptation, he sees,

Her heavenly form
Angelic, but more soft and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air
Of gesture or least action, overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought.
That space the Evil One abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed,

Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge.

It is but for a moment that he hesitates, the hot hell that always in him burns, Though in mid Heaven, soon ended his delight, And tortures him now more, the more he sees Of pleasure not for him ordained. Then soon Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites :

"Thoughts, whither have ye led me? with what sweet Compulsion thus transported to forget

What hither brought us? hate, not love, nor hope

Of Paradise for Hell, hope here to taste

Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy,
Save what is in destroying; other joy
To me is lost."

Satan is now a Devil,-irretrievably and irrevocably.

In the future history of the world, he may sink to the level of the Hebrew Satan in the Book of Job, or of the Mephistopheles in Faust, or of the mediæval Devil of legend, or of the Arch-Fool of Luther; but the Archangel of the Epic of the Fall of Man is an essentially grand creation, of whose after career we know nothing. He had accomplished his part as the hero of an Epic, and the dazzling glamour which had distinguished him, as the prince of Archangels in the Empyrean, still surrounds him in his fall, although lurid clouds may partially obscure him, whether as the Angel of Presumption of Cædmon or as the Satan of Paradise Lost.

CHAPTER VIII.

Three Poetic Hells: The Torture-house of Cadmon, the Inferno of Dante, and the Hell of Milton.

ITHERTO, we have omitted all mention of the

HIT

Divina Commedia of Dante, since this great work cannot be regarded, except in a very general way, as forming any essential part, or indeed any part whatsoever, of the Epic of the Fall of Man. As we shall presently see, the action of this sublime Allegory opens some five thousand years after the supposed era of the Fall; but, nevertheless, it is so intimately connected with the Epic, and offers so many interesting topics of contrast, if not of comparison, that we propose, in the present chapter, to consider a few of the points of similarity or dissimilarity between the Allegory and the Epic; more especially, with regard to the early legendary Hell of Cadmon, the medieval, philosophical Hell of Dante, and the modern, traditional Hell of Milton.

It is well known that Lord Macaulay assigns to

Dante the third place among the six greatest poets of the world; allowing to Shakespeare and Homer alone, the distinction of superior poetic merit, and relegating Milton to the fifth place in this suum cuique list.

Whether we agree with Lord Macaulay or not, in this dictum of his, it is beyond dispute that the Divina Commedia is the grandest and most profound religious allegory of which Europe can boast; while Paradise Lost is the grandest and most learned sacred epic, in verse, of which England can boast.

Moreover, there are several striking marks of resemblance between these two great poets and thinkers.

Both were men of remarkable talents and erudition. As Mr. Eliot Norton very truly says, " Dante was a born student as he was a born poet, and had he never written a single poem, he would still have been famous as the most profound scholar of his times. Far, as he surpassed his contemporaries in poetry, he was no less their superior in the depth and extent of his knowledge."

It has been estimated that, so far as concerns the Classical authors alone, and not including the wide field of Scholastic theology and philosophy, over one thousand passages may be found in Dante's works, as direct citations, obvious references, or evident

allusions, showing the wide range of his research and reading in this branch of learning. Aristotle is quoted or referred to, three hundred times; and there is scarcely an important work of Aristotle which is not represented, and often very fully represented, in the pages of Dante. With Virgil's works, especially with the Æneid, he shows himself to be thoroughly acquainted, and introduces at least two hundred quotations from or references to the Mantuan poet. Ovid, Cicero, Horace, Livy, Juvenal, and Seneca are often quoted or referred to, and, besides all this, we have scattering references to Homer, Plato, and others. Our admiration of Dante's acquirements becomes indefinitely increased when we remember the difficulties under which this surprising amount of learning was amassed; when we reflect that it was in the days before the invention of printing, when books existed only in manuscript, and were consequently very rare and difficult of access; when there were no helps for study in the way of notes and dictionaries, no conveniences for reference, such as divisions of chapters, sections, paragraphs; above all, no indexes or concordances to help the fallible memory; when, finally, we add to all this the consideration of the circumstances of Dante's own life, a turbulent, wandering, unsettled life, a life of which we may truly say, "without were