nounces the Divina Commedia to have nothing to do with theology; that it is a purely political poem; that it attacks the pope as the head of the Guelphic party, without any reference to his spiritual character; that it is, in short, a covert enterprise of the Ghibellin against the Guelph; and that its language is a kind of freemason's phraseology, only to be understood by the initiated. Thus amor, for instance, stands for Roma, by inversion; or, if it be written amore, then it stands for amo-re, by division; and in these senses combined, it implies, that the Ghibellin loved a king for Rome, or, in other words, thought that Italy would prosper best under the single sceptre of the emperour;-Donna, or Madonna, is the power of the emperour;-salute is the emperour himself, for, like the Marquis of Carabas, the emperour is here and there and everywhere;—I morté are the Guelphs; I vivi are the Ghibellins, &c. With these keys, and some others of the same sort, Signor Rosetti unlocks all the mysteries of Dante for a considerable time-till at length it pleases the poet, for some reason or another, to lay aside these symbols and adopt a fresh set, which are discovered, however, by the commentator with the same sagacity as before, and the treasure-house is opened with the same success as before. Nor is this all other secrets are to be got at by piecing syllables together which are scattered throughout a whole line, or even half a dozen lines, when up starts a Ghibellin, or your old friend the emperour-like harlequin, whose limbs being collected from different quarters of the stage, combine at once into a perfect and living man. For example, that glorious passage in the ninth canto, descriptive of the approach of the angel to the city of Dis, of which we spoke in the article already alluded to, wraps up the emperour in a way which certainly might have escaped an ordinary reader; -non altrimenti è fatto che d'un vento impetuoso per gli avversi ardori Che fier la selva; e senz alcun rattento, &c., where it will be perceived by the letters in italics, that the emperour Enrico is very intelligibly expressed. Now, supposing this scheme to be as sound as we are afraid it is visionary, we should think it a misfortune to be thoroughly versed in it. In our eyes, it would be the utter ruin of Dante as a poet, and sundry curious conundrums would be all that we should get in exchange for those noble bursts of inspiration which we had found in him, or thought we had found in him, in the days of our happier ignorance of these rabbinical expositions. Besides, to us it is an offensive idea, that the sublime scenes of an invisible world of souls, a hell, a purgatory, and a paradise, should, after all, be only parables relating to a factious squabble in Italy. This seems to us to be reversing the order of things grievously, and making the thing typified of ten-fold less consequence than the type. Who, for instance, (to advert once again to the passage in the ninth canto,) would not rather believe that the city of Dis meant the city of Dis than the city of Florence? That the heretics it contained were really heretics than Guelphs? That the angel who descended to open the gates which were shut against Dante and Virgil, was actually a messenger of God, empowered with his wand to smite the portals, and make a way into that infernal town, than that it was the Emperour Henry, with his sceptre, demanding admission for the Ghibellins into Florence? We do not dispute the ingenuity of Signor Rosetti; we are only contending that it is misapplied; indeed, when this, his favourite theory, does not cross his path, his commentary is excellent, keeping close to the text, completing the ellipses, and leading his reader by the. hand, step by step, through the rough places of his difficult author, with an admirable knowledge of the road. For the reasons, therefore, which we have given, we shall continue to regard Dante more as the theologian than the politician, and proceed, as we were about to do before this digression, to say a word or two on the view he took of his church. Its doctrines, we repeat, he allowed, and only exclaimed against their perversion. For the accommodation of heretics in another world, he provides, like a good son of his intolerant mother, sepulchres glowing with fervent heat, and no suspicion seems to cross his mind that they were thus out of their proper element. A purgatory, he admits, and stations at its gate an angel duly armed with his keys and commission from St. Peter: yet he tells us that the apostle had cautioned him against opening too freely, and admitting a herd of miscreants who would trample him to death, (Purg. xi.) He believes it to be the duty of those who are alive, to pray for the souls that are therein, and he represents them, in their turn, making supplication for their friends on earth (Purg. xi.); but he adds, in direct opposition to all excessive merchandise of souls, that purgatory did, in fact, receive very few-that its doors creaked on their hinges for want of use, and that mankind, in general, rushed headlong, and at once to the bottomless pit, (Purg. x.) Priestly absolution he does not dispute, yet he reckons it profitless without repentance; and a luckless friar, who had sinned at the pope's suggestion, and upon the faith of his promise that he would open heaven for him notwithstanding, finds himself, to his surprise, amongst the damned, (Infern. xxvii.) He condemns to a joyless abode, among the spirits in prison (as his church taught him) all who had died without baptism, however innocent their lives, (Infern. iv.) He constantly addresses the Virgin in language of the most chivalrous devotion, and sometimes with the most touching tenderness, (Purg. xx.) He kindles at the thought of a crusade, and bitterly reproaches the pope and cardinals with brooding brooding over their gains; whilst Nazareth, where Gabriel spread his angel wings,' was left a prey to the infidels, (Par. ix.) He had no wish to interfere with the rights of the clergy as ministers of God, and gratuitously selects as a subject for sculpture, the death of Uzzah, when he stretched forth an unconsecrated hand to bear up the ark, (Purg. x.) But the union of secular and ecclesiastical dominion he holds in abomination; this he would tear asunder; to this he imputes the spiritual downfall of the church (Purg. xxvi.); and pouring out upon its consequent corruptions the fiercest vials of his wrath, he denounces it as the destroyer of his country, (Purg. x.) the beast, (xvi.) the harlot, (xxxii.) He peoples his hell with its ministers, plaguing them with divers plagues; and they dash against each other huge stones in disorderly conflict; and they stand on their heads in burning jars; and are closed up in regions of thick-ribbed ice; and make their moan from the summits of pyramids of flame in which they are enveloped; and are crushed under excessive weights; and are torn by the forks of vindictive fiends, when they venture to peep out of the boiling pitch wherein is their everlasting portion. Dante would have rejoiced to see his church efficient and prosperous. To its radical errors in faith he was not alive, for he was a reader and admirer of Thomas Aquinas, (Par. x. et seq.) and was evidently better versed in the historical and picturesque parts of the scriptures, than in the doctrinal; but that there was something in it grievously wrong he was fully aware, and so was Petrarch who succeeded him. Petrarch, like Dante, was a good catholic; he had no desire to quarrel with the established creed; he was himself a churchman; he had a priest in his house, and built a chapel to the Virgin, at Arqua: but his own powerful language almost sinks under the indignation he feels, at the abominations which had polluted the sanctuary. He calls down fire from heaven upon his church, as the mother of all the wickedness which was abroad in the world, (Son. 194.) Bacchus and Venus are its gods, (195.) Beelzebub sits in the midst of its bishops, blowing up with his bellows the flames of their lusts, (194.) In an old edition of the Sonnets of Petrarch, which lies before us, these to which we have referred, and others like to them, have been carefully effaced by the hand of some former owner, whose manes we have no intention to disturb, whilst we offer to our readers the following translation of the hundred and ninety-sixth : Thou fruitful spring of woe! thou hapless home Thou impious Babylon, once hallowed Rome! Forge Forge of all fraud! dread prison-house and tomb "Tis strange, O hell, by living fiends possessed, Now at thy parents dost thou lift the horn, And purge thy world, O God! o'er which we mourn.' The spirit which spake in these men (and in Petrarch it spake yet more vehemently, if possible, in his letters than in his poetry) was preparing the way for the reformers; and an abhorrence of the abuses of a system, was the natural forerunner of an inquiry into the cause of those abuses, and a suggestion of the remedy. The corruption, however, continued unabated, and the effect it now began to produce was no longer a feeling of indignation,that had died away,-but a feeling of levity and heartless unbelief: religion itself seemed ready to founder under the insupportable weight of the vices of its professors. Now an air of jesting and licentious badinage, upon subjects the most sacred, was gone forth, and we look in vain for the earnestness of a former age, which, amidst all its errors, could not behold with patience the prostitution of a blessing it knew how to value, and loathed the wickedness of men who could find in their hearts to poison the fountains of living waters. It was now the fashion to ascribe to Turpin, an archbishop, (a fictitious one to be sure,) whatever monstrous and incredible lies a romancer might invent, and to appeal with mock gravity to the authority of such a character for their truth. The addresses to the deity or saint, with which the cantos of the Morgante Maggiore begin, seem often to breathe sincerity, and even devotion; yet it is very difficult to reconcile the frequent burlesque application of the language, the imagery, and even the doctrines of the scriptures, in which this poem abounds, with a belief in their authority. Pulci, perhaps, was not after all an infidel professed, as the French (who never lose one for want of claiming him) would persuade us; but he was one of thousands, both clergy (to whom he belonged) and laity, whose motto still was vive la bagatelle,' and who went thoughtlessly dancing to the grave of their faith like flies to a candle. The same spirit manifests itself in the poets that followed him,-a spirit of illtimed levity on the gravest subjects. We do not deny that passages might be produced both from Ariosto and Berni, which, taken by themselves, would seem to show that they were Christians and even Roman catholic Christians; but still they are perpetually petually laughing in their sleeve. If they affect to look serious, they succeed, like Cicero's augurs, when they met in the street. If a thought of religion comes across them, it is sure to be associated with Friar Tuck. They feel no loyalty (how should they?) towards the system by which such men earned their bread, and without heeding what distant consequences might result from their sportive sallies, they amuse themselves at the expense both of clergy and creed, and let the world pass. They forwarded, however, the reformation, without meaning it. They might say with the boy, who threw a stone at a dog and hit his stepmother, that, though it was intended otherwise, it was not quite lost. Such passages as the following must have operated like one of Luther's caricatures. Astolfo climbs to the moon, and, amongst other odd furniture which had escaped to that planet from the earth, 'Of soups all spilt an ocean he espies, And of his doctor asks the interpretation; "Tis alms, quoth he, which when the good man dies, A mount of flowers he sees, of stately size, Orland. Fur. xxxiv. 80. Again, the angel Michael is represented by Ariosto, as having received orders to look for Silence, and to lead him to the assistance of some recruits, who were on their march to join the Christian army at Paris; but were anxious that the enemy should have no intelligence of their approach. When he had executed this commission, he was to find Discord, and turn her loose amongst the pagan troops, to waste and divide their strength : Now Michael, pondering where to go in quest Of Silence, came to this determination, So, where these good men meet in congregation; 'Nor |