The holy coat set up in opposition to the crown of thorns; the windingsheet puffed up to the disparagement of the swaddling-clothes. Holy images eternally turning up their eyes, eternally nodding their heads from their canvass, crucifixes slinking down from their crosses and roaming about like uneasy ghosts; Madonnas shifting their quarters across seas and mountains, with goods and chattels, like tortoises with their shells on their back.

Such was Catholicism for full ten centuries; such is it, to a great extent, even at the present day, in most parts of Italy; such it was especially in the age of Dante. The reformation of the militant orders, the proclamation of the first jubilee, the déménagement of the house of Loretto, the exhibition of the St. Veronica, and other momentous transactions and portents of the same nature, occurred within the brief period of Dante's career.

The bigotry and fanaticism of the age was, of course, proportionate to this display of ranting devotion. Fire and sword were never busier in the work of amputation and cauterisation of the rotten members of the church. Roasting of heretics, under the name of Paterini and Cathari, the Methodists and Puritans of the middle ages, had become, in the Lombard cities, an almost daily ceremony. In his hellish pictures, surely the poet needed no better models than such as priest-ridden society exhibited everywhere around him.

And Dante's stern genius was undoubtedly affected by the barbarism of his age, and imbibed with its ferocious spirit. Undertaken, as it was, with religious and political views, widely in advance of his benighted contemporaries, his work was, in its material parts, consonant with the wild notions prevailing around him. Dante's Hell is a monkish Hell in good earnest, with all its howling and gnashing of teeth. His demons are bonâ fide devils, long-horned, long-tailed, black as they ever were painted. Melted pitch and brimstone, serpents, dragons, fire, and ice, are the ingredients of the awful mess he sets before his readers. Nay more, all such horrors are served up with such a terrible earnestness, that any honest believer of those times could sup full of them, and labour with nightmares ever afterwards.

Mr. Leigh Hunt, and other modern critics, may justly object to so very hot and ungentlemanly a place of punishment; but Dante, it should be remembered, was either himself a true believer in the church of the thirteenth century, such as it was, or, knowing that he was writing for its votaries, blindly adopted the only language they were able to understand.

To many of the followers of a more enlightened and rational Christianity, which has almost altogether shamed or laughed the devil out of countenance, the framework of Dante's Hell must certainly appear baroque and exaggerate. By the side of the proud and almost sublime Pluto of Tasso, and Satan of Milton, Dante's Alichinos and Farfarellos are poor devils, indeed.

Strange to say, and in conformity, perhaps, with the title of " Comedy," so quaintly prefixed to the poem, the "Inferno" has its humorous passages. Dante's devils are, some of them, droll fellows, who will crack their jokes with their victims, banter and argue with them; they are rude customers more often, blackguards up to the meanest tricks, the very fathers of lies. Spite of their frolics, however, and spite of their hideous grins, it is im

possible to mistake the tragic tone that pervades the poet's mind, all along its dolorous progress; among the vainest sports of his unruly fancy, no less than in its gloomiest inspiration, the oddity or wildness of conception is always set forth with terrible earnestness of diction. The powers of utterance are always in keeping with the depth and vastness of thought. There is a life-like palpableness in every object brought before us, which can be accounted for by nothing short of the actual evidence of the senses. 66 Verily, this man," as the old women at Verona observed, "has seen and touched the horrors he depicts." An eloquence impressive, efficient in the same measure as it disdains all attempts at effecta fancy that casts and moulds not-creates, and never stoops to mere description- an inventiveness that fears no weariness, knows no exhaustion; startling, revolting, wringing our heart, rending it fibre from fibre—a phantasmagory of loathsome, dire suffering, never stopping at any climax of horror, of agony, but always seeking, "beyond the deepest hell a deeper still," till it revels on the misery of beings, "whose very tears choke up all utterance of woe, clustering on the lids from intense cold, and closing the outlet against the following heart-drops, which are thus driven inwards with unspeakable accumulation of anguish."

VIII.
PURGATORY.

BUT Dante's stern genius could no less dwell and luxuriate on softer and tenderer images. What effort of human fancy ever equalled the ineffable calm, rapture, and abandonment which pervades his rhymes, when finally emerging from that blind abyss of all sorrows, he breathes again the vital air, and descries from afar "the tremulous glitter of the ocean wave."

It is not for me to test the soundness of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, or to inquire which of the holy fathers first dreamt of its existence. It was, however, a sublime contrivance, unscriptural though it may be; a conception full of love and charity, in so far as it seemed to arrest the dead on the threshold of eternity, and by making his final welfare partly dependent on the pious exertions of those who were left behind, established a lasting interchange of tender feelings, embalmed the memory of the departed, and, by a posthumous tie, wedded him to the mourning survivor.

There is order and method in the most grievous errors, in the most arrant follies of mankind. The finger of Providence is traceable throughout man's history upon earth. Popery and monkhood-nay, even purgatory-had their own great purpose to work out. Woe to the man, in Dante's age, who sunk in his grave without bequeathing a heritage of love; on whose sod no refreshing dew of sorrowing affection descended. Lonely as his relics in his sepulchre, his spirit wandered in the dreaded region of probation; alone he was left, defenceless, prayerless, friendless, to settle his awful scores with unmitigated justice!

It is this feeling, unrivalled for poetic beauty in Christian religion, that gives colour and tone to the second division of Dante's poem. The five or six cantos, at the opening, have all the milk of human nature that entered into the composition of that miscalled saturnine mind. With little more than two words, the poet makes us aware that we have come

into happier latitudes. Every shade we meet breathes love and forgivepess, The strange visitor is only charged with tidings of joy to the living, and messages of good-will. The heart lightens and brightens at every new stratum of the atmosphere in that rising region; the ascent is easy and light, like the gliding of a boat down stream. The angels we become familiar with are creatures of light, such as human imagination never before or afterwards conceived. They come from afar across the waves, piloting the barge that conveys the chosen spirits to Heaven, balancing themselves on their wide-spread wings, using them as sails, disdaining the aid of all mortal contrivance, and relying on their inexhaustible strength; red and rayless, at first, from the distance, as the planet Mars, when he appears struggling through the mist of the horizon, but growing brighter and brighter with amazing swiftness. They stand at the gate of Purgatory, they guard the entrance of each of the seven steps of its mountain, some with green vesture, vivid as new-budding leaves, gracefully waving and floating in ample drapery, fanned by their wings; bearing in their hands flaming swords broken at the point; others, in ash-coloured garments; others, again, in flashing armour, but all beaming with so intense, so overwhelming a light, that dizziness overcomes all mortal ken whenever directed to their countenance.

The friends of the poet's youth one by one arrest his march and engage him in tender converse. The very laws of immutable fate seem for a few instants suspended to allow full scope for the interchange of affectionate sentiments. The overawing consciousness of the place he is in for a moment forsakes the mortal visitor so miraculously admitted into the world of spirits. He throws his arms round the neck of the beloved shade, and it is only by the smile irradiating its countenance that he is reminded of the intangibility of its etherial substance. The episodes of the Purgatory are mostly of this sad and tender description. The historical personages introduced seem to have lost their own identity, and to have merged into a blessed calmness, the characterising medium of the region they are all travelling through.

But the Purgatory, and still more the Paradise of Dante are terra incognita to most of his readers, strange to say, to most of his warmest eulogists. They sink deep into the circles of Hell till they stick fast to it, forgetting that the poet's mind towers loftier and loftier with powers commensurate to the progress of his subject.

IX.

PARADISE.

THERE are forty days in Italy to the season of Lent, and every day has its sermon. Out of the numberless legion of priests and monks swarming on that genial soil, hardly three hundred are preachers. Sacred orators there are rare birds, and as such also migratory; they wander from place to place like strolling players. A bag of forty sermons will last throughout a man's life. Written among his school prize essays, learnt by heart by long usage, the same discourses will affect, charm, or terrify a hundred audiences. Success in the pulpit depends on the look of the person, his tone of voice, and impassioned delivery. Monks, Franciscans most of all, are, generally speaking, the darlings; with the coquetry of their shaven crown, with the picturesqueness of their flowing costume. Friar Jeromes and Friar Eustaces are as notorious characters as Grisi the singer, and Cerito the dancer.

Of the forty sermons comprising his Lent stock, or quaresimale, the

choice of subjects lies with the preacher himself; of four only the theme is given. These are delivered on appointed days. They are the test of the orator's abilities. The result of these four days' begging establishes for ever, or demolishes his reputation. The subject of these four benefit days called the Novissimi are the Last Judgment, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

The first, second, and third discourse are generally impressive enough. But the stumbling-block lies on the gate of Paradise. Mental and bodily pain surround us so incessantly in this our earthly abode, that it requires no extraordinary stretch of imagination to make a good hell or a plausible purgatory of it. But where is our pattern for the home of the elected? What do we know of pleasure on earth save only sensualities, that are neither unalloyed nor enduring? The poor Italian preachers dare not draw a picture of Pagan or Mohametan Paradise; they cannot cram their auditors with ambrosia and nectar, or allure them with a tableau vivant of ever-vernal Houris. Aware of the partiality of their countrymen for music, they paint the heavenly court as a never-ending concert; an orchestra of angels and doctors fiddling and strumming to eternity!

Dante, who was their authority for the realms of sorrow had, however, supplied them with a nobler element of celestial enjoyment. The most ardent longing of the human soul whilst imprisoned in clay, he argued, is thirst for knowledge-the highest reward to the enfranchised spirit, must therefore be inexhaustible, unlimited, unquenchable knowledge.

Paradise is, therefore, a long exposition of what mortals can and cannot know. Familiar with all the learning of his own times, Dante, a phoenix of geniuses, groped in the dark in pursuit of hidden truths; he toiled, he fretted, struggling to force his way through the iron limits of human understanding, he aspired beyond, beyond! and by the aid of daring assumptions and sweeping conclusions, by the daily practice of bewildering abstraction, he often hit the mark with wondrous accuracy, and vaguely, instinctively forestalled the more inert and plodding march of common intelligence.

Every branch of learning, in those singular times had for its ultimate object and subject-God. Colleges were almost exclusively divinity schools. All the classical lore that began slowly to emerge from the still smouldering ruins of ancient civilisation, all the arguments of the subtle and cavilling pseudo-Aristotelian philosophy, then on its utmost ascendency, were brought to bear on the most arduous points of theology. It was at the best an idle, impertinent, unprofitable divinity; it busied itself with inextricable niceties of abstruse definitions, it sought the solution or rather the tangible representation, the materialisation of the most awful mysteries; it inquired into the age, the rank, the attributes of the complicate hierarchy of spirits, it dived into fathomless metaphysical subtleties to account for the essence, the influence, the working of the Deity. The deluded enthusiasts; they forgot to love and to serve while they strove to know God!

And Dante was warm in the pursuit of this forbidden knowledge, as wild as any of the angelic or seraphic doctors that preceded him. He had explored all creation; but this glorified, without explaining, the Creator. He sought God in Heaven-saw him-and all the problems that harassed him before that terrible journey, became as simple, as obvious as every spot in the valley or the hill-side is laid bare to the gaze of him who looks down from the summit.

From that dizzy altitude the poet assumed the tone of an oracle: all that men sought he had found. A great deal of this superhuman knowledge was, indeed, lost to him, for so utterly absorbed were all his faculties in that intense contemplation, that they could hardly recover all consciousness, and render an account of the overpowering sensation. Still enough remained of the recollection, of the reflection of the ocean of light that but for an instant encompassed, ingulfed him to enable him to amaze with its revelation the startled fancies of his benighted fellow mortals.

Dante's Heaven is indeed, heavenly. Angels' smiles beam through his verses. The progress from planet to planet, otherwise imperceptible is made manifest to him by successive changes in the countenance of his eternal guide, Beatrice. The increased effulgence of her heavenly loveliness makes him aware he is basking in the rays of a region of purer light. Her cheeks radiate with roseate smiles in the genial sphere of Venus; they glow with a phosphorescent light in the ruddy orbit of Mars; they fade in the silvery whiteness of the planet Jupiter, as a maiden's blush from which the crimson of sudden emotion is as suddenly seen to evanesce-and after thus passing successively through all phases of entrancing beauty, they are, all at once, bereft of their ineffable smile. Her face becomes a blank to her lover, lest the brilliancy of that smile should prove fatal to his unprotected eyes, burn and consume him—even as Semele was turned into ashes; for at every step in those eternal palace stairs, beauty kindles as it climbs, so that, but for the interference of a tempering medium, but for a partial eclipse, mortal ken would shrink from it, even as a leaf parched and withered by a thunder blast.

As in the region of eternal doom the souls of the reprobate were oftentimes deformed by their turpitudes so as to become indiscernible to all knowledge; so are now the chosen ones beautified beyond recognition. They have, at least, to the eyes of their mortal visitor, lost all shape and semblance to human beings. They assume the appearance of blazing lights, moving incessantly round with unutterable harmony, and sparkling with redoubled refulgency when they wish to address the earthly stranger; for every word conveyed through their lips is a message of love and joy-and joy shows itself in Heaven by increase of light, and every smile is a flash.

There is something wild, vague, overpowering in the strange phantasmagory of all these myriads of lights. They revolve around us as we read, like the undefinable splendours that, some of us may recollect, haunted our cradles in childhood, when a whole canopy, as if of coloured dots of vivid flame, glittered above our heads in an apparently boundless vastness of space, and rolled slowly and steadily about, till it seemed to set beneath us, and we hung upon it, at the height of many thousand fathoms, as if ready to plunge, cradle and all, into the luminous abyss, when we started up half in wonder, half in dismay, and roused the whole household with our infantine screams.

From the moment the poet is raised into the orbit of the moon, it seems as if a cloud encompassed him, translucent, solid, and high polished, even as adamant on which the sunbeams smite. Within the bosom of this ever-lasting pearl he glides, as a ray of light pierces through water, without dividing its substance: and through the faint dimness of the circumambient gem many faces are seen eagerly gazing at the new comer, even as human features appear faintly reflected in the still waves of a