Truly, Charlemagne and Otho, though crowned at Rome, had their home in the north. Still were they styled Roman emperors; they were by right kings of Italy, and Italy was still the centre of civilised lifeRome, still the metropolis of the Christian world. The centralisation and fusion of mankind into one people, the plenitude of the times-peace and order, could only take place when the successor of the Cæsars should be restored to his natural residence on the capitol. This restoration of the seat of empire at Rome, this return of the Eagle to its native eyrie, was the object of the ardent longings of the noblest spirits. No one dived deeper into that redeeming idea than the clear-sighted patriot, Dante. Only, against the futherance of this scheme, militated the ambition of the pontiff's. The high priest was unwilling to make room for the monarch.

Sovereigns, in the middle ages, reigned, but ruled not. Feudalism in France and Germany, municipal democracy in Italy, had stripped the sceptre of all substantial power. Emperors and popes were, in reality, at the mercy of their vassals. They were but a name and a standard-formidable or contemptible, according as the great tide of opinion set in for or against them. Every petty lord, every mean town had its own weight in that anarchic political scale. Papists, Imperialists-Guelphs, and Ghibelines-the two parties perpetually shifted their ground, blending a thousand local interests with the great cause of mankind.

But parties, in the middle ages, however hostile, were never bent on utter extermination. They loved fighting for its own sake, they warred for the assertion of unmeaning claims, for the vindication of idle privileges, for the enforcement of vain forms of vassalage. The most arrant Guelph, the most inveterate Ghibeline, were equally penetrated with the idea of the necessity of the co-existence of a pope and emperor. The great difficulty arose in the nice definition of their respective powers, in the equitable settlement of their mutual demands. Dante was borne a Guelph, in a city zealous in the support of that cause. After his banishment, he was compelled to take refuge with Ghibelines, and thought to have adopted the maxims of these latter. He has been, therefore, charged with apostacy; the name of "fierce Ghibeline" has been applied as a by-word to him-designating him as a partizan of a foreign despot, a foe to popular freedom.

But Dante never was at heart Guelph or Ghibeline. With views widely above the notions of his brawling contemporaries, he made, as he bravely expressed it, his own party, and aimed at a reconciliation of all parties, under what seemed to him the only practical social system.

The empire was for him an abstract principle. He revered the crown -no matter on what brows it was laid by Providence-as the rallying point for all the factions of distracted Italy. Nothing but the iron hand of a supreme ruler, he urged, could heal the wounds of that bleeding country. He evinced no hostility to popular freedom; but he thought that streams of civil bloodshed, proscriptions, banishments, all the atrocities of intolerance and misrule, were but indifferent symptoms of rational liberty. He beheld all the cities of Romagna and Lombardy fallen from excess of licentiousness into the hands of the most unlimited, galling tyranny. One legitimate master was for him preferable to a hundred despots. Imperial authority never had been, never, by its organic constitution, could be despotic in Italy. An emperor-no matter where he was

born-could be no French or German prince. He was the emperor, that is something by virtue of his office essentially Italian and Roman. The estrangement of the crown from Italian heads, the absence of the Cæsar from Italy was the result of national degeneracy; it was in its turn the source of all national calamities. On the restoration of the ancient order of things, rested all hopes for future harmony and peace, all hopes for Italian independence, greatness, and happiness in after ages; all hopes for that preponderance which Italy was still destined to exercise for the enlightenment of the human races-for that social and moral ascendency, for that intellectual dominion which Rome would once more assert on the gratitude, not on the terror, of subdued nations.

Unity of church and state in Italy-peace and civilisation to the world -such were the great, and, at contrary events too fatally averred, prophetic views of Dante's loyal patriotism. Had the stubborn republicans of his own times never lost sight of his awful warning, had they all been Ghibelines, in Dante's own sense of the word; had they all joined under the standard of such men as Frederic II., or Manfred of Puglia-the cup of misery which ages of bondage and abjection have not yet thoroughly drained, might have been suffered to pass from the lips of their guiltless posterity.

IV.

DANTE'S RELIGIOUS SPIRIT.

AGAIN. Dante was a staunch Papist, a believer in one Catholic, apostolical Roman church. He showed everywhere the same instinctive dread of division. He abominated religious sectarianism as he detested political faction. Christianity and unity of faith and worship were indissolubly associated in his mind. He thought the empire itself, originally, eternally intended to body forth the universality of the church. He was for an unlimited centralisation of ecclesiastical hierarchy. There was to be a high priest on earth as there was a Supreme Being in Heaven. No man ever entertained a more overweening sense of the sacredness of pontifical ministry.

And it was precisely this transcendent reverence for the indelible character of the vicar of Christ, that rendered him so implacable against the hideous specimens of papal holiness, whom he beheld seated on the chair of St. Peter. Dante's pope must be a priest, a Levite, a "king of prayers, lord of the sacrifice," far removed from the turmoil of human passions, for the sake of his own dignity, placed beyond reach of the tempests of political life.

V.

LEIGH HUNT ON DANTE.

Few men's works have been more widely and more intensely read than Dante's; and yet no man's character has been more egregiously mis-understood. From Boccaccio to Leigh Hunt, his friends, no less than his adversaries, have dwelt on the poet's "ferocious hates and bigotries," and painted him as a man narrow-minded in his views, implacable in his enmities, blind in his partialities.

Dante was, undoubtedly, a man of strong convictions, of a proud, disdainful spirit, of violent passions; but his uprightness and conscientiousness were always commensurate with the extreme excitability of his feelings. He was a fearless, uncompromising lover of justice and truth; led

into error, maybe, by his passions, or by the passions of his age; but unshaken in his stern independence, in his unswerving consistency.

The presence of a great criminal, or the recital of any startling enormity leads him to inveigh against a whole city, against a whole people, against all mankind, with an outburst of indiscriminate indignation; a too close adherence to his social principles makes him visit with the most severe censure, deeds, virtuous in themselves, honest in the motives that dictated them, but fatal in their results upon the cause of humanity; but no instance occurs of indulgence in personal feeling.

As a warrior, as a citizen, as a magistrate at home, as a lonely and destitute wanderer abroad-as a ruler over a riotous multitude, as a sullen and ungracious courtier in the palace of the great, he was invariably actuated by the same strict conscience of duty, which set him at variance with all existing parties, hastened his downfall at Florence, and aggravated the desolation of his friendless exile. And it was this same keen sense of right, this fast tenacity of opinion, which rendered him bigoted and intolerant, though it may be proved that, even in the hottest ebullition of his withering disdain, the principle, not the person, was the object of his enmity. The Florentine magistrates who signed the iniquitous sentence of his banishment, as well as other relentless persecutors, never obtained the honour of the most passing allusion in that book where no one was forgotten; and Pope Boniface VIII., himself, to whom the poet justly referred all his public and private grievances, becomes sacred in his eyes the moment the agents of Philip of France lay their hands on his inviolable person-a sacrilege which the pious Catholic stigmatised as tantamount to a re-crucifixion of Christ. So much for Dante's bigotries and personal rancours.

Thus in his age of premature decline, when hope withering after hope, he receded from active struggle, and renounced the expectation of hastening by his own hand the maturity of his momentous designs-when at war with his own generation he drew his cloak around him, and shunned the contaminating intercourse of men-he resolved to refer his own and the world's cause to the judgment of posterity, and to bequeath to a more righteous race the treasure of his redeeming ideas-he determined to write.

VI.

WORKING OF DANTE'S MIND.

FROM his earliest childhood, a deep, an ardent votary of knowledge drawing from the fresh-flowing sources of science with all the idolatrous enthusiasm of a Cimmerian for a new-dawning light, Dante had, as it were, multiplied his existence, to reconcile the genial enjoyments of contemplative life with the arduous duties of his public career. As a poet and a scholar he had already no equal when he only sought rest and relaxation in his intellectual pursuits.

But henceforth his learning must become an instrument—his genius a weapon. His song shall go forth as the word among the latest generations.

He sought, then, a subject as unlimited as his own powers-a worldembracing theme, to which no topic could be extraneous; by a daring abstraction he aspired to fathom the infinite.

Sore beset with the misunderstandings and disappointments of this life,

he looked for redress and justification in another. Dante sought out another world-a world of his own, in which the one he had so long been worried in, should be judged and sentenced.

The ideas of mankind were in those dark ages perpetually revolving upon that life beyond life, which the omnipresent religion of that fanatical age loved to people with appalling phantoms and harrowing terrors. Dante determined to anticipate his final doom, and, still in the flesh, to break through the threshold of eternity and explore the kingdom of death.

He would "sweep adown the gulf of time," sound the great mystery of the hidden world, lay it bare to the gaze of terrified mortals, and startle the earth with the awful tidings of Heaven and Hell.

A minister of retributive justice, he would visit the shades of men anciently or recently departed; he would unmask hypocrisy and restore crushed innocence, chastise arrogance and assuage sorrow, mediate between the helpless dead and the oblivious survivor; above all, reveal the annals of the fast-fading past, and turn its teeming records into a severe lesson for the present, into a threatening warning for the future.

The meeting of illustrious dead, whose very sight would ever after "exalt him in his own conceit," the interview with lately departed, longlamented friends, whose undying love would soothe the wounds of his sensitive heart, the exultation of the righteous, the confusion of the reprobate, the impartial dealing of God's eternal justice, which would reconcile him to the temporary prevalence of human iniquity—all throughout his unearthly progress enabled him to indulge in a ceaseless outpouring of his over-wrought feelings.

His political theories respecting the equitable distribution of secular and spiritual powers, his views of a total reformation of Church and State, on which the destinies of his ill-fated country so virtually depended -his cosmographic notion of earth and firmament-his conjectures as to the essence, the attributes, and the eternal activity of the Deity-all his opinions, the result of deep thought and unwearied research, should now receive the sanction of super-human testimony. His doctrines should flow from the unerring lips of ancient sages, of the apostles and doctors of the church. The most abstruse problems should find a solution; the most controverted truths should be tested by the arguments of heavenly doctrine, in that transparent etherial region where is the end of all doubt. Angels and saints should now become his authority.

And Dante, be it remembered, had his own saint in Heaven, a guardian saint praying for, watching over him. Beatrice, the love-dream of his childhood-the vaguely worshipped idol of his untried heart-the sacred torch of truth and virtue treasured up in his bosom with the pious vigilance of a vestal-Beatrice, now guiding his star, the fairest flower of Paradise, the purest angel of God.

That same Beatrice allegorically invested with the sublime character of divine knowledge, commiserating the grievous errors of her ancient adorer, led astray by the violence of earthly passions, bewildered by the din of political factions, will now solicit from the eternal court permission to escort her beloved into Heaven. She will be his Mentor and teacher as soon as the Latin poet, Virgil-also an allegorical character personifying human reason-shall have led him through the circles of the gulf of darkness and up the steps of Purgatory-as soon as purified of human

frailty, and freed from mortal error, as soon as regenerated by immersion in the waters of oblivion, he shall be worthy to gaze upon her beaming countenance, and to steal one of her looks from the entrancing contemplation of the beatific vision.

VII.

HELL.

No poet ever struck upon a subject to which every fibre in the heart of his contemporaries more readily responded than Dante, when he undertook to write his Universal Gazetteer of the kingdom of death,-his hand-book for travellers to Heaven and Hell.

Soldiers and priests, in modern times, alternately govern the world. A peal of the organ is antiphonal to a flourish of trumpets. To an age of brawling and blustering, a period of fasting and psalm-singing succeedsa palmy era of tract societies and evangelical alliances. A procession of monks treads on the footsteps of invading hosts. Abbeys rise on battlefields, and cowled or surpliced foxes snatch up the prey for which lions and tigers are bleeding to death.

But in the age of Dante praying and fighting went side by side. The ark of the covenant rose in the midst of martial encampments. The priesthood of Christ gloried in the name of church-militant. The bishop said mass in his coat-of-arms, and rival fraternities knocked each other down with their crucifixes. The whole system of faith and worship was made to fit an age of outrage and violence. Christianity ruled by terror. Religion was then indeed the fear of God. Fear of the devil had been a more appropriate expression. Human laws had no hold on the guilty besides the gallows. The gospel had no argument stronger than Hell.

Consequently, priests and friars did not fail to make the most of that awful bugbear. Souls in temporary or in everlasting penance, met the sinner at every corner of the streets: hideous daubs on the walls, dismal carvings on the doors. Such bristling hair, such staring eyes as might haunt the most unimaginative man throughout life, and startle him from his slumbers. Their pangs and groans, their appalling curses were daily rehearsed on the pulpit.

The very games and sports of the people had something of a diabolical character. The Arno at Florence was often tricked out into a fancied representation of the bottomless pit. The populace on the bridge feasted on the half-grotesque, half-terrible drama, till the crazy structure sunk beneath the weight of the thronging multitude, and the gulf beneath, crammed with the dead and dying, presented in good earnest the scene it had been made to resemble in frolic.

The most immediate effect of this gloomy religion had been to turn almost all Europe into one vast monkery. Nor were friars, white, black, and grey, deemed sufficient; but the world teemed with lay fraternities without number, a set of amateur monks, a kind of militia and yeomanry, subsidiary to the regular host. The roads swarmed with long trains of pilgrims in white hoods, black hoods, sacks, shrouds, and other masquerade costumes in every variety, arousing the astounded population with the mad freaks of their noisy piety. Jubilees, revivals, all the worst revels of religion run mad, hand-in-hand with murder, arson, all the horrors of ceaseless, objectless war, anarchy, utter moral and social disorganisation. New relics brought forth every day to turn the tide of devotion.