2 Maccabees iv. 13: "Now such was the height of Greek fashions,

2 Maccabees iv. 13: "Now such was the height of Greek fashions, and increase of the heathenish manners, through the exceeding profaneness of Jason, that ungodly wretch and not high priest, that the priests had no courage to serve any more at the alter, but, despising the temple, and neglecting the sacrifices, hastened to be partakers of the unlawful allowance in the place of exercise, after the game of Discus called them forth."

87. Philip the Fair of France. See Note 82."He was one of the handsomest men in the world," says Villani IX. 66, "and one of the largest in person, and well proportioned in every limb,--a wise and good man for a layman."

94. Matthew, chosen as an Apostle in the place of Judas.

99. According to Villani, VII. 54, Pope Nicholas III. wished to marry his niece to a nephew of Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily. To this alliance the King would not consent, saying :"Although he wears the red stockings, his lineage is not worthy to mingle with ours, and his power is not hereditary." This made the Pope indignant and, together with the bribes of John of Procida, led him to encourage the rebellion in Sicily, which broke out a year after the Pope's death in the "Sicilian Vespers," 1282.

107. The Church of Rome under Nicholas, Boniface, and Clement. Revelation xvii. 1-3:-- "And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters; with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. " The seven heads are interpreted to mean the Seven Virtues, and the ten horns the Ten Commandments.

110. |Revelation xvii. 12, 13:--And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings,...and shall give their power and strength unto the beast."

117. Gower, Confes. Amant., Prologus:--

Which to Silvester in pure almesse

229

the firste Constantinus lefte."

Upon this supposed donation of immense domains by Constantine to the Pope, called the "Patrimony of St. Peter," Milman, Lat. Christ., Book I. ch. 2, remarks:-- "Silvester has become a kind of hero of religious fable. But it was not so much the genuine mythical spirit which unconsciously transmutes history into legend; it was rather deliberate invention, with a specific aim and design, which, in direct defiance of history, accelerated the baptism of Constantine, and sanctified a porphyry vessel as appropriated to, or connected with, that holy use: and at a later period produced the monstrous fable of the Donation. "But that with which Constantine actualy did invest the Church, the right of holding landed property, and receiving it by bequest, was far more valuable to the Christian hierarchy, and not least to the Bishop of Rome, than a premature and prodigal endowment."

Canto 20

1. In the Fourth Bolgia are punished the Soothsayers:--

Backward they look, and backward make their way."

9. Processions chanting prayers and supplications.

13. Ignaro in Spenser's Faerie Queene, I. viii. 31:--

How he did fashion his untoward pace;

For as he forward moved his footing old,

So backward still was turned his wrinkled face."

34. Amphiaraus was one of the seven kings against Thebes. Foreseeing his own fate, he concealed himself, to avoid going to the war; but his wife Eriphyle, bribed by a diamond necklace (as famous in ancient story as the Cardinal de Rohan's in modern), revealed his hiding-place, and he went to his doom with the others. Aeschylus, The Seven against Thebes: "I will tell of the sixth, a man most prudent and in valor the best, the seer, the mighty Amphiaraus... And through his mouth he gives utterance to this speech... `I, for my part, in very truth shall fatten this soil, seer as I am, buried beneath a hostile earth.'" Statius, Thebaid, VIII. 47, Lewis's Tr.:--

230

And in the list of Argive chiefs enrolled,

Resigned to fate I sought the Theban plain;

Whence flock the shades that scarce thy realm contain; When, how my soul yet dreads! an earthquake came,

Big with destruction, and my trembling frame,

Rapt from the midst of gaping thousands, hurled

To night eternal in thy nether world."

40. The Theban soothsayer. Ovid, Met., III., Addison's Tr.:--

Two twisted snakes he in conjunction view'd,

When with his staff their slimy folds he broke,

And lost his manhood at the fatal stroke.

But, after seven revolving years, he view'd

The self-same serpents in the self-same wood:

`And if,' says he, `such virtue in you lie,

That he who dares your slimy folds untie

Must change his kind, a second stroke I'll try.'

Again he struck the snakes, and stood again

New-sex'd, and straight recovered into man...

When Juno fired,

More than so trivial an affair required,

Deprived him, in her fury, of his sight,

And left him groping round in sudden night.

But Jove (for so it is in heav'n decreed

That no one god repeal another's deed)

Irradiates all his soul with inward light,

And with the prophet's art relieves the want of sight." 45. His beard. The word "plumes" is used by old English writers in this sense. Ford, Lady's Trial:--

Of softness is exchanged for plumes of age."

See also Purg. I. 42.

46. An Etrurian soothsayer. Lucan, Pharsalia, I., Rowe's Tr.:--

Aruns by name, a venerable sage,

At Luna lived."

Ruskin, Modern Painters, III. p. 246, says:-- "But in no part of the poem do we find allusion to mountains in any other than a stern light; nor the slightest evidence that Dante cared to look at them. From that hill of San Miniato, whose

231 steps he knew so well, the eye commands, at the farther extremity of the Val d'Arno, the whole purple range of the mountains of Carrara, peaked and mighty, seen always against the sunset light in silent outline, the chief forms that rule the scene as twilight fades away. By this vision Dante seems to have been wholly unmoved, and, but for Lucan's mention of Aruns at Luna, would seemingly not have spoken of the Carrara hills in the whole course of his poem: when he does allude to them, he speaks of their white marble, and their command of stars and sea, but has evidently no regard for the hills themselves. There is not a single phrase or syllable throughout the poem which indicates such a regard. Ugolino, in his dream, seemed to himself to be in the mountains, `by cause of which the Pisan cannot see Lucca'; and it is impossible to look up from Pisa to that hoary slope without remembering the awe that there is in the passage; neverthelss it was as a hunting-ground only that he remembered these hills. Adam of Brescia, tormented with eternal thirst, remembers the hills of Romena, but only for the sake of their sweet waters."

55. Manto, daughter of Tiresias, who fled from Thebes, the "City of Bacchus," when it became subject to the tyranny of Cleon. 63. Lake Benacus is now called the Lago di Garda. It is pleasantly alluded to by Claudian in his "Old Man of Verona," who has seen "the grove grow old coeval with himself."

To him remoter than the swarthy Ind;

He deems the Lake Benacus as the shore

Of the Red Sea."

65. The Pennine Alps, or Alpes Paenae, watered by the brooklets flowing into the Sarca, which is the principal tributary of Benaco.

69. The place where the three dioceses of Trent, Brescia, and Verona meet.

70. At the outlet of the lake.

77. Aeneid, X.:--

Milton, Lycidas:--

232 82. Manto. Benvenuto da Imola says: "Virgin should here be rendered Virago."

93. Aeneid, X.: "Ocnus,...son of the prophetic Manto, and of the Tuscan river, who gave walls and the name of his mother to thee, O Mantua!"

95. Pinamonte dei Buonacossi, a bold, ambitious man, persuaded Alberto, Count of Casalodi and Lord of Mantua, to banish to their estates the chief nobles of the city, and then, stirring up a popular tumult, fell upon the rest, laying waste their houses, and sending them into exile or to prison, and thus greatly depopulating the city.

110. Iliad, I. 69: "And Calchas, the son of Thestor, arose, the best of augurs, a man who knew the present, the future, and the past, and who had guided the ships of the Achaeans to Ilium, by the power of prophecy which Phoebus Apollo gave him."

112. Aeneid, II. 114: "In suspense we send Eurypylus to consult the oracle of Apollo, and he brings back from the shrine these mournful words: `O Greeks, ye appeased the winds with blood and a virgin slain, when first ye came to the Trojan shores; your return is to be sought by blood, and atonement made by a Grecian life.'" Dante calls Virgil's poem a Tragedy, to make its sustained and lofty style, in contrast with that of his own Comedy, of which he has already spoken once, Canto XVI. 138, and speaks again, Canto XXI. 2; as if he wished the reader to bear in mind that he is wearing the sock, and not the buskin.

116. "Michael Scott, the Magician," says Benvuenuto da Imola, "practised divination at the court of Frederick II., and dedicated to him a book on natural history, which I have seen, and in which among other things he treats of Astrology, then deemed infallible... . It is said, moreover, that he foresaw his own death, but could not escape it. He had prognosticated that he should be killed by the falling of a small stone upon his head, and always wore an iron skull-cap under his hood, to prevent this disaster. But entering a church on the festival of Corpus Domini, he lowered his hood in sign of veneration, not of Christ, in whom he did not believe, but to deceive the common people, and a small stone fell from aloft on his bare head." The reader will recall the midnight scene of the monk of St. Mary's and William of Deloraine in Scott's Law of the Last Minstrel, Canto II.:--

To meet the wondrous Michael Scott;

233

A wizard of such dreaded fame

That when, in Salamanca's cave,

Him listed his magic wand to wave,

The bells would ring in Notre Dame!

Some of his skill he taught to me;

And, warrior, I could say to thee

The words that cleft Eildon hills in three,

And bridled the Tweed with a curb of stone;

But to speak them were a deadly sin;

and for having but thought them my heart within,

A treble penance must be done."

And the opening of the tomb to recover the Magic Book:--

As if he had not been dead a day.

His hoary beard in silver rolled,

He seemed some seventy winters old;

A palmer's amice wrapped him round,

With a wrought Spanish baldric bound,

Like a pilgrim from beyond the sea;

His left hand held his book of might;

A silver cross was in his right;

The lamp was placed beside his knee:

High and majestic was his look,

At which the fellest fiends had shook,

And all unruffled was his face:--

They trusted his soul had gotten grace."

See also Appendix to the Lay of the Last Minstrel.

118. Guido Bonatti, a tiler and astrologer of Forli, who accompanied Guido di Montefeltro when he marched out of Forli to attack the French "under the great oak." Villani, VII. 81, in a passage in which the he and him get a little entangled, says: "It is said that the Count of Montefeltro was guided by divination and the advice of Guido Bonatti (a tiler who had become an astrologer), or some other strategy, and he gave the orders; and in this enterprise he gave him the gonfalon and said, `So long as a rag of it remains, wherever thou bearest it, thou shalt be victorious'; but I rather think his victories were owing to his own wits and his mastery in war." Benvenuto da Imola reports the following anecdote of the same personages. "As the Count was standing one day in the large and beautiful square of Forli, there came a rustic mountaineer and gave him a basket of pears. And when the Count said, `Stay and sup with me,' the rustic answered, `My Lord, I wish to go home before it rains; for infallibly there will be much rain today. ' The Count, wondering at him, sent for Guido Bonatti, as a great

234 astrologer, and said to him, `Dost thou hear what this man says?' Guido answered, `He does not know what he is saying; but wait a little.' Guido went to his study, and, having taken his astrolable, observed the aspect of the heavens. And on returning he said that it was impossible it should rain that day. But the rustic obstinately affirmed what he had said, Guido asked him, `Howe dost thou know?' The rustic answered, `Because to-day my ass, in coming out of the stable, shook his head and picked up his ears, and whenever he does this, it is a certain sign that the weather will soon change.' Then Guido replied, `Supposing this to be so, how dost thou know there will be much rain"' `Because,' said he, `my ass, with his eyes pricked up, turned his head aside, and wheeled about more than usual.' Then, with the Count's leave, the rustic departed in haste, much fearing the rain, though the weather was very clear. And an hour afterwards, lo, it began to thunder, and there was a great down-pouring of waters, like a deluge. Then Guido began to cry out, with great indignation and derision, `Who has deluded me? Who has put me to shame?' And for a long time this was a great source of merriment among the people." Asdente, a cobbler of Parma. "I think he must have had acuteness of mind, although illiterate; some having the gift of prophecy by the inspiration of Heaven." Dante mentions him in the Convito, IV. 16, where he says that, if nobility consisted in being known and talked about, "Asdente the shoemaker of Parma would be more noble than any of his fellow-citizens."

126. The moon setting in the sea west of Seville. In the Italian popular tradition to which Dante again alludes, Par. II. 51, the Man in the Moon is Cain with his Thorns. This belief seems to have been current too in England, Midsummer Night's Dream, III, 1: "Or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of moon-shine. " And again, V. 1: "The man should be put into the lantern. How is it else the man i' the moon?...All that I have to say is to tell you, that the lantern is the moon; I, the man in the moon; this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog." The time here indicated is an hour after sunrise on Saturday morning.

Canto 19

1. The Fifth Bolgia, and the punishment of Barrators, or "Judges who take bribes for giving judgment."

2. Having spoken in the preceding Canto of Virgil's "lofty Tragedy, " Dante here speaks of his own Comedy, as if to

235 prepare the reader for the scenes which are to follow, and for which he apologizes in Canto XXII. 14, by repeating the proverb,

With saints, and in the tavern with carousers."

7. Of the Arsenal of Venice Mr. Hillard thus speaks in his Six Months in Italy, I. 63:-- "No reader of Dante will fail to pay a visit to the Arsenal, from which, in order to illustrate the terrors of his `Inferno', the great poet drew one of these striking and picturesque images, characteristic alike of the boldness and the power of his genius, which never hesitated to look for its materials among the homely details and familiar incidents of life. In his hands, the boiling of pitch and the calking of seams ascend to the dignity of poetry. Besides, it is the most impressive and characteristic spot in Venice. The Ducal Palace and the Church of St. Mark's are symbols of pride and power, but the strength of Venice resided here. Her whole history, for six hundred years, was here epitomized, and as she rose and sunk, the hum of labor here swelled and subsided. Here was the index-hand which marked the culmination and decline of her greatness. Built upon several small islands, which are united by a wall of two miles in circuit, its extent and completeness, decayed as it is, show what the naval power of Venice once was, as the disused armor of a giant enables us to measure his stature and strength. Near the entrace are four marble lions, brought by Morosini from the Peloponnesus in 1685, two of which are striking works of art. Of these two, one is by far the oldest thing in Venice, being not much younger than the battle of Marathon; and thus, from the height of twenty-three centuries, entitled to look down upon St. Mark's as the growth of yesterday. The other two are non- descript animals, of the class commonly called heraldic, and can be syled lions only by courtesy. In the armory are some very interesting objects, and none more so than the great standard of the Turkish admiral, made of crimson silk, taken at the battle of Lepanto, and which Cervantes may have grasped with his unwounded hand. A few fragments of some of the very galleys that were engaged in that memorable fight are also preserved here."

37. Malebranche, Evil-claws, a general name for the devils. 38. Santa Zita, the Patron Saint of Lucca, where the magistrates were called Elders, or Aldermen. In Florence they bore the name of Priors.

41. A Barrator, in Dante's use of the word, is to the State what a Simoniac is to the Church; one who sells justice, office, or

236 employment. Benvenuto says that Dante includes Bontura with the rest, "because he is speaking ironically, as who should say, `Bontura is the greatest barrator of all.' For Bontura was an arch- barrator, who sagaciously led and managed the whole commune, and gave offices to whom he wished. He likewise excluded whom he wished."

46. Bent down in the attitude of one in prayer; therefore the demons mock him with the allusion to the Santo Volto.

48. The Santo Volto, or Holy Face, is a crucifix still preserved in the Cathedral of Lucca, and held in great veneration by the people. The tradition is that it is the work of Nicodemus, who sculptured it from memory. See also Sacchetti, Nov. 73, in which a preacher mocks at the Santo Volto in the church of Santa Croce at Florence.

49. The Serchio flows near Lucca. Shelley, in a poem called The Boat, on the Serchio, describes it as a "torrent fierce,"

Shallow, smooth, and strong, doth come;

Swift as fire, tempestuously

It sweeps into the affrighted sea.

In the morning's smile its eddies coil,

Its billows sparkle, toss, and boil,

Torturing all its quiet light

Into columns fierce and bright."

63. Canto IX. 22:--

Was conjured by that pitiless Erictho,

Who summoned back the shades unto their bodies."

95. A fortified town on the Arno in the Pisan territory. It was besieged by the troops of Florence and Lucca in 1289, and capitulated. As the garrison marched out under safe-guard, they were terrified by the shouts of the crowd, crying: "Hang them! hang them!" In this crowd was Dante, "a youth of twenty-five," says Benvenuto da Imola.

110. Along the circular dike that separates one Bolgia from another.

111. This is a falsehood, as all the bridges over the next Bolgia are broken. See Canto XXIII. 140.

237

112. At the close of the preceding Canto the time is indicated as being an hour after sunrise. Five hours later would be noon, or the scriptural sixth hour, the hour of the Crucifixion. Dante understands St. Luke to say that Christ died at this hour. Convito, IV. 23: "Luke says that it was about the sixth hour when he died; that is, the culmination of the day." Add to the "one thousand and two hundred sixty-six years," the thirty-four of Christ's life on earth, and it gives the year 1300, the date of the Infernal Pilgrimage.

114. Broken by the earthquake at the time of the Crucifixion, as the rock leading to the Circle of the Violent, Canto XII. 45:--

Both here and elsewhere made such over-throw."

As in the next Bolgia Hypocrites are punished, Dante couples them with the Violent, by making the shock of the earthquake more felt near them than elsewhere.

125. The next crag or bridge, traversing the dikes and ditches. 137. See Canto XVIII. 75.

Canto 22

5. Aretino, Vita di Dante, says, that Dante in his youth was present at the "great and memorable battle, which befell at Campaldino, fighting valiantly on horseback in the front rank." It was there he saw the vaunt-couriers of the Aretines, who began the battle with such a vigorous charge, that they routed the Florentine cavalry, and drove them back upon the infantry.

7. Napier, Florentine Hist., I. 214-217, gives this description of the Carroccio and the Martinella of the Florentines:--"In order to give more dignity to the national army and form a rallying point for the troops, there had been established a great car, called the Carroccio, drawn by two beautiful oxen, which, carrying the Florentine standard, generally accompanied them into the field. This car was painted vermilion, the bullocks were covered with scarlet cloth, and the driver, a man o{f} some consequence, was dressed in crimson, was exempt from taxation, and served without pay; these oxen were maintained at the public charge in a public hospital, and the white and red banner of the city was spread above the car between two lofty spars. Those taken at the battle of Monteaperto are still exhibited in Siena Cathedral as trophies of that fatal day. "Macchiavelli erroneously places the adoption of the Carroccio by

238 the Florentines at this epoch, but it was long before in use, and probably was copied from the Milanese, as soon as Florence became strong and independent enough to equip a national army. Eribert, Archbishop of Milan, seems to have been its author, for in the war between Conrad I. and that city, besides other arrangements for military organization, he is said to have finished by the invention of the Carroccio: it was a pious and not impolitic imitation of the ark as it was carried before the Israelites. This vehicle is described, and also represented in ancient paintings, as a four-wheeled oblong car, drawn by two, four, or six bullocks: the car was always red, and the bullocks, even to their hoofs, covered as above described, but with red or white according to the faction; the ensign staff was red, lofty, and tapering, and surmounted by a cross or golden ball: on this, between two white fringed veils, hung the national standard, and half-way down the mast, a crucifix. A platform ran out in front of the car, spacious enough for a few chosen men to defend it, while behind, on a corresponding space, the musicians with their military instruments gave spirit to the combat: mass was said on the Carroccio ere it quitted the city, the surgeons were stationed near it, and not unfrequently a chaplain also attended it to the field. The loss of the Carroccio was a great disgrace, and betokened utter discomfiture; it was given to the most distinguished knight, who had a public salary and wore conspicuous armor and a golden belt: the best troops were stationed round it, and there was frequently the hottest of the fight... "Besides the Carroccio, the Florentine army was accompanied by a great bell, called Martinella, or Campana degli Asini, which, for thirty days before hostilities began, tolled continually day and night from the arch of Porta Santa Maria, as a public declaration of war, and, as the ancient chronicle hath it, `for greatness of mind, that the enemy might have full time to prepare himself. ' At the same time also, the Carroccio was drawn from its place in the offices of San Giovanni by the most distinguished knights and noble vassals of the republic, and conducted in state to the Mercato Nuovo, where it was placed upon the circular stone still existing, and remained there until the army took the field. Then also the Martinella was removed from its station to a wooden tower placed on another car, and with the Carroccio served to guide the troops by night and day. `And with these two pomps, of the Carroccio and Campana,' says Malespini, `the pride of the old citizens, our ancestors, was ruled.'"

15. Equivalent to the proverb, "Do in Rome as the Romans do." 48. Giampolo, or Ciampolo, say all the commentators; but nothing more is known of him than his name, and what he tells us here of his history.

239

52. It is not very clear which King Thibault is here meant, but it is probably King Thibault IV., the crusader and poet, born 1201, died 1253. His poems have been published by Lev#eque de la Ravalli@ ere, under the title of Les Poesies du Roi de Navarre; and in one of his songs (Chanson 53) he makes a clerk address him as the Bons rois Thiebaut. Dante cites him two or three times in his Volg. Eloq., and may have taken this expression from his song, as he does afterwards, Canto XXVIII. 135, lo Re joves, the Re Giovane, or Young King, from the songs of Bertrand de Born. 65. A Latian, that is to say, an Italian.

82. This Frate Gomita was a Sardinian in the employ of Nino de' Visconti, judge in the jurisdiction of Gallura, the "gentle Judge Nino" of Purg. VIII. 53. The frauds and peculations of the Friar brought him finally to the gallows. Gallura is the northeastern jurisdiction of the island.

88. Don Michael Zanche was Seneschal of King Enzo of Sardinia, a natural son of the Emperor Frederick II. Dante gives him the title of Don, still used in Sardinia for Signore. After the death of Enzo in prison at Bologna, in 1271, Don Michael won by fraud and flattery his widow Adelasia, and became himself Lord of Logodoro, the northwestern jurisdiction, adjoining that of Gallura. The gossip between the Friar and the Seneschal, which is here described by Ciampolo, recalls the Vision of the Sardinian poet Araolla, a dialogue between himself and Gavino Sambigucci, written in the soft dialect of Logodoro, a mixture of Italian, Spanish, and Latin, and beginning:--

Fuggitivas cun doppia pena mia,

Qui quanto pius l'istringo sunt passada."

See Valery, Voyages en Corse et en Sardaigne, II. 410.

Canto 23

1. In this Sixth Bolgia the Hypocrites are punished.

Chaucer, Knightes Tale, 2780:--

240

Alone, withouten any compagnie."

And Gower, Conf. Amant.:--

To muse in his philosophie

Sole withouten compaignie.

4. The Fables of Aesop, by Sir Roger L'Estrang, IV.:"There fell out a bloody quarrel once betwixt the Frogs and the Mice, about the sovereignty of the Fenns; and whilst two of their champions were disputing it at swords point, down comes a kite powdering upon them in the interim, and gobbles up both together, to part the fray."

7. Both words signifying "now"; mo, from the Latin modo ; and issa, from the Latin ipsa; meaning ipsa hora. "The Tuscans say mo," remarks Benvenuto, "the Lombards issa."

37. "When he is in a fright and hurry, and has a very steep place to go down, Virgil, has to carry him altogether," says Mr. Ruskin. See Canto XII., Note 2.

63. Benvenuto speaks of the cloaks of the German monks as "ill-fitting and shapeless."

66. The leaden cloaks which Frederick put upon malefactors were straw in comparison. The Emperor Frederick II. is said to have punished traitors by wrapping them in lead, and throwing them into a heated caldron. I can find no historic authority for this. It rests only on tradition; and on the same authority the same punishment is said to have been inflicted in Scotland, and is thus described in the ballad of "Lord Soulis," Scott's Ministrelsy of the Scottish Border, IV. 256:--

On a circle of stones but barely nine;

They heated it red and fiery hot,

Till the burnished brass did glimmer and shine.

A sheet of lead for a funeral pall,

And plunged him into the caldron red,

And melted him,--lead, and bones, and all."

We get also a glimpse of this punishment in Ducange, Glo. Capa Plumbea, where he cites the case in which one man tells another: "If our Holy Father the Pope knew the life you are leading, he

241 would have you put to death in a cloak of lead."

67. Comedy of Errors, IV. 2:--"A devil in an everlasting garment hath him."

91. Bolgna was renowned for its University; and the speaker, who was a Bolognese, is still mindful of his college.

95. Florence, the bellissima e famosissima figlia di Roma, as Dante calls it, Convito, I. 3.

103. An order of knighthood, established by Pope Urban IV. in 1261, under the title of "Knights of Santa Maria." The name Frati Gaudenti, or "Jovial Friars," was a nickname, because they lived in their own homes and were not bound by strict monastic rules. Napier, Flor. Hist. I. 269, says:-- "A short time before this a new order of religious nighthood under the name of Frati Gaudenti began in Italy: it was not bound by vows of celibacy, or any very severe regulations, but took the usual oaths to defend widows and orphans and make peace between man and man: the founder was a Bolognese gentleman, called Loderingo di Liandolo, who enjoyed a good reputation, and along with a brother of the same order, named Catalano di Malavolti, one a Guelph and the other a Ghibelline, was now invited to Florence by Count Guido to execute conjointly the office of Podest@a. It was intended by thus dividing the supreme authority between two magistrates of different politics, that one should correct the other, and justice be equally administered; more especially as, in conjunction with the people, they were allowed to elect a deliberative council of thirty-six citizens, belonging to the principal trades without distinction of party." Farther on he says that these two Frati Gaudenti "forfeited all public confidence by their peculation and hypocrisy." And Villani, VII. 13: "Although they were of different parties, under cover of a false hypocrisy, they were of accord in seeking rather their own private gains than the common good."

108. A street in Florence, laid waste by the Guelfs.

113. |Hamlet, I. 2:--

115. Caiaphas, the High-Priest, who thought "expediency" the best thing.

121. Annas, father-in-law of Caiaphas.

242 134. The great outer circle surrounding this division of the Inferno.

142. He may have heard in the lectures of the University an exposition of John viii. 44:

Canto 24

1. The Seventh Bolgia, in which Thieves are punished.

2. The sun enters Aquarius during the last half of January, when the Equinox is near, and the hoar-frost in the morning looks like snow on the fields, but soon evaporates. If Dante had been a monk of Monte Casino, illuminating a manuscript, he could not have made a more clerkly and scholastic flourish with his pen than this, nor have painted a more beautiful picture than that which follows. The mediaeval poets are full of lovely descriptions of Spring, which seems to blossom and sing through all their verses; but none is more beautiful or suggestive than this, though serving only as an illustration.

21. In Canto I.

43. See what Mr. Ruskin says of Dante as "a notably bad climber," Canto XII. Note 2.

55. The ascent of the Mount of Purgatory.

73. The next circular dike, dividing the fosses.

86. This list of serpents is from Lucan, Phars. IX. 711, Rowe's Tr. :--

And trace a reeking furrow on the plain.

The spotted Cenchris, rich in various dyes,

Shoots in a line, and forth directly flies.

The Swimmer there the crystal stream pollutes,

And swift thro' air the flying Javelin shoots.

The Amphisbaena doubly armed appears

243

At either end a threatening head she rears;

Raised on his active tail Pareas stands,

And as he passes, furrows up the sands."

Milton, Parad. Lost, X. 521:--

Of hissing through the hall, thick-swarming now

With complicated monsters head and tail,

Scorpion, and asp, and amphisbaena dire,

Cerastes horned, hydrus, and elops drear,

And dipsas."

Of the Phareas, Peter Comestor, Hist. Scholast., Gloss of Genesis iii. 1, says: "And this he (Lucifer) did by means of the serpent; for then it was erect like man; being afterwards made prostrate by the curse; and it is said the Phareas walks erect even to this day." Of the Amphisbaena, Brunetto Latini, Tresor I. v. 140, says: "The Amphimenie is a kind of serpent which has two heads; one in its right place, and the other in the tail; and with each she can bite; and she runs swiftly, and her eyes shine like candles." 93. Without a hiding-place, or the heliotrope, a precious stone of great virtue against poisons, and supposed to render the wearer invisible. Upon this latter vulgar error is founded Boccaccio's comical story of Calandrino and his friends Bruno and Buffulmacco, Decam., Gior. VIII., Nov. 3.

107. Brunetto Latini, Tresor I. v. 164, says of the Phoenix: "He goeth to a good tree, savory and of good odor, and maketh a pile thereof, to which he setteth fire, and entereth straightway into it toward the rising of the sun." And Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1697:

Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,

Like that self-begotten bird

In the Arabian woods embost,

That no second knows nor third,

And lay erewhile a holocaust,

From out her ashy womb now teemed,

Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most

When most unactive deemed;

And, though her body die, her fame survives

A secular bird ages of lives."

114. Any obstruction, "such as the epilepsy," says Benvenuto. "Gouts and dropsies, catarrhs and oppilations," says Jeremy

244 Taylor. 125. Vanni Fucci, who calls himself a mule, was a bastard son of Fuccio de' Lazzari. All the commentators paint him in the darkest colors. Dante had known him as "a man of blood and wrath," and seems to wonder he is here, and not in the circle of the Violent, or of the Irascible. But his great crime was the robbery of a sacristy. Benvenuto da Imola relates the story in detail. He speaks of him as a man of depraved life, many of whose misdeeds went unpunished, because he was of noble family. Being banished from Pistoia for his crimes, he returned to the city one night of the Carnival, and was in company with eighteen other revellers, among whom was Vanni della Nona, a notary; when, not content with their insipid diversions, he stole away with two companions to the church of San Giacomo, and, finding its custodians absent, or asleep with feasting and drinking, he entered the sacristy and robbed it of all its precious jewels. These he secreted in the house of the notary, which was close at hand, thinking that on account of his honest repute no suspicion would fall upon him. A certain Rampino was arrested for the theft, and put to the torture; when Vanni Fucci, having escaped to Monte Carelli, beyond the Florentine jurisdiction, sent a messenger to Rampino's father, confessing all the circumstances of the crime. Hereupon the notary was seized "on the first Monday in Lent, as he was going to a sermon in the church of the Minorite Friars," and was hanged for the theft, and Rampino set at liberty. No one has a good word to say for Vanni Fucci, except the Canonico Crescimbeni, who, in the Comentarj to the Istoria della Volg. Poesia, II. ii., p. 99, counts him among the Italian Poets, and speaks of him as a man of great courage and gallantry, and a leader of the Neri party of Pistoia, in 1300. He smooths over Dante's invectives by remarking that Dante "makes not too honorable mention of him in the Comedy"; and quotes a sonnet of his, which is pathetic from its utter despair and self-reproach:--

Through little wit, and not of mine own will."

It is like the wail of a lost soul, and the same in tone as the words which Dante here puts into his mouth. Dante may have heard him utter similar self-accusations while living, and seen on his face the blush of shame, which covers it here.

143. The Neri were banished from Pistoia in 1301; the Bianchi, from Florence in 1302.

145. This vapor or lightning flash from Val di Magra is the Marquis Malaspini, and the "turbid clouds" are the banished Neri

245 of Pistoia, whom he is to gather about him to defeat the Bianchi at Campo Piceno, the old battle-field of Catiline. As Dante was of the Bianchi party, this prophecy of impending disaster and overthrow could only give him pain. See Canto VI. Note 65. Canto 25

2. This vulgar gesture of contempt consists in thursting the thumb between the first and middle fingers. It is the same as the ass- driver made at Dante in the street; Sacchetti, Nov. CXV.: "When he was a little way off, he turned around to Dante, and thrusting out his tongue and making a fig at him with his hand, said, `Take that.'" Villani, VI. 5, says: "On the Rock of Carmignano there was a tower seventy yards high, and upon it two marble arms, the hands of which were making the figs at Florence." Others say these hands were on a finger-post by the road-side. In the Merry Wives of Windsor, I. 3, Pistol says:"Convey, the wise it call; Steal! foh; a fico fo the phrase!" And Martino, in Beaumont and Fletcher's Widow, V. 1:--

Go with him."

10. Pistoia is supposed to have been founded by the soldiers of Catiline. Brunetto Latini, Tresor, I. i. 37, says: "They found Catiline at the foot of the mountains and he had his army and his people in that place where is now the city of Pestoire. There was Catiline conquered in battle, and he and his were slain; also a great part of the Romans were killed. And on account of the pestilence of that great slaughter the city was called Pestoire." The Italian proverb says, Pistoia la ferrigna, iron Pistoia, or Pistoia the pitiless.

15. Capaneus, Canto XIV. 44.

19. See Canto XIII. Note 9.

25. Cacus was the classic Giant Despair, who had his cave in Mount Aventine, and stole a part of the herd of Geryon, which Hercules had brought to Italy. Virgil, Aeneid, VIII., Dryden's Tr.:--

Where still the shattered mountain spreads the ground: That spacious hold grim Cacus once posessed,

Tremendous find! half human, half a beast:

Deep, deep as hell, the dismal dungeon lay,

246

Dark and impervious to the beams of day.

With copious slaughter smoked the purple floor,

Pale heads hung horrid on the lofty door,

Dreadful to view! and dropped with crimson gore."

28. Dante makes a Centaur of Cacus, and separates him from the others because he was fraudulent as well as violent. Virgil calls him only a monster, a half-man, Semihominis Caci facies.

35. Agnello Brunelleschi, Buoso degli Abati, and Puccio Sciancato.

38. The story of Cacus, which Virgil was telling.

43. Cianfa Donati, a Florentine nobleman. He appears immediately, as a serpent with six feet, and fastens upon Agnello Brunelleschi. 65. Some commentators contended that in this line papiro does not mean paper, but a lamp-wick made of papyrus. This destroys the beauty and aptness of the image, and rather degrades

Which has grown through the clefts in the ruins of ages." 73. These four lists, or hands, are the fore feet of the serpent and the arms of Agnello.

76. Shakespeare, in the "Additional Poems to Chester's Love's Martyrs, " Knight's Shakespeare, VII. 193, speaks of "Two distincts, division none"; and continues:--

That the self was not the same,

Single nature's double name

Neither two nor one was called.

Saw division grow together;

To themselves yet either neither,

Simple were so well compounded."

83. This black serpent is Guercio Cavalcanti, who changes form with Buoso degli Abati.

95. Lucan, Phars., IX., Rowe's Tr.:--

From the first object turns their wondering eyes.

Wretched Sabellus by a Seps was stung:

247

Fixed on his leg with deadly teeth it hung.

Sudden the soldier shook it from the wound,

Transfixed and nailed it to the barren ground.

Of all the dire, destructive serpent race,

None have so much of death, though none are less.

For straight around the part the skin withdrew,

The flesh and shrinking sinews backward flew,

And left the naked bones exposed to view.

The spreading poisons all the parts confound,

And the whole body stinks within the wound.

Small relics of the mouldering mass were left,

At once of substance as of form bereft;

Dissolved, the whole in liquid poison ran,

And to a nauseous puddle shrunk the man.

So snows dissolved by southern breezes run,

So melts the wax before the noonday sun.

Nor ends the wonder here; though flames are known

To waste the flesh, yet still they spare the bone:

Here none were left, no least remains were seen,

No marks to show that once the man had been.

A fate of different kind Nasidius found,--

A burning Prester gave the deadly wound,

And straight a sudden flame began to spread,

And paint his visage with a glowing red.

With swift expansion swells the bloated skin,--

Naught but an undistinguished mass is seen,

While the fair human form lies lost within;

The puffy poison spreads and heaves around,

Till all the man is the monster drowned.

No more the steely plate his breast can stay,

But yields, and gives the bursting poison way.

Not waters so, when fire the rage supplies,

Bubbling on heaps, in boiling caldrons rise;

Nor swells the stretching canvas half so fast,

When the sails gather all the driving blast,

Strain the tough yards, and bow the lofty mast.

The various parts no longer now are known,

One headless, formless heap remains alone."

97. Ovid, Metamorph., IV., Eusden's Tr.:--

Down to my face: still touch what still is mine.

O let these hands, while hands, be gently pressed,

248

While yet the serpent has not all posessed.'

More he had spoke, but strove to speak in vain,--

The forky tongue refused to tell his pain,

And learned in hissings only to complain.

Glide not in such a monstrous shape away!

Destruction, like impetous waves, rolls on.

Where are thy feet, thy legs, thy shoulders, gone?

Changed is thy visage, changed is all thy frame,--

Cadmus is only Cadmus now in name.

Ye Gods! my Cadmus to himself restore

Or me like him transform,--I ask no more.'"

And V., Maynwaring's Tr.:--

My fainting limbs, at every pore expressed;

My strength distilled in drops, my hair in dew,

My form was changed, and all my substance new:

Each motion was a stream, and my whole frame

Turned to a fount, which still preserves my name."

See also Shelly's Arethusa:--

From her couch of snows

In the Acroceraunian mountains,--

From the cloud and from crag

With many a jag

Shepherding her bright fountains.

She leapt down the rocks,

With her rainbow locks

Streaming among the streams;

Her steps paved with green

The downward ravine

Which slopes to the western gleams;

And gliding and springing,

She went, ever singing,

In murmurs as soft as sleep.

The Earth seemed to love her,

And Heaven smiled above her,

As she lingered towards the deep."

144. Some editions read la penna, the pen, instead of la lingua, the tongue.

151. Gaville was a village in the Valdarno, where Guercio Cavalcanti was murdered. The family took vengeance upon the

249 inhabitants in the old Italian style, thus causing Gaville to lament the murder. Canto 26

1. The Eighth Bolgia, in which Fraudulent Counsellors are punished.

4. Of these five Florentine nobles, Cianfa Donati, Agnello Brunelleschi, Buoso degli Abati, Puccio Sciancato, and Guercio Cavalcanti, nothing is known but what Dante tells us. Perhaps that is enough.

7. See Purg. IX. 13:--

The little swallow, near unto the morning,

Perchance in memory of her former woes

And when the mind of man, a wanderer

More from the flesh, and less by thought imprisoned,

Almost prophetic in its visions is."

9. The disasters soon to befall Florence, and in which even the neighboring town of Prato would rejoice, to mention no others. These disasters were the fall of the wooden bridge of Carraia, with a crowd upon it, witnessing a Miracle Play on the Arno; the strife of the Bianchi and Neri; and the great fire of 1304. See Villani, VIII. 70, 71. Napier, Florentine History, I. 394, gives this account:-- "Battles first began between the Cerchi and Giugni at their houses in the Via del Garbo; they fought day and night, and with the aid of the Cavalcanti and Antellesi the former subdued all that quarter: a thousand rural adherents strengthened their bands, and that day might have seen the Neri's destruction if an unforseen disaster had not turned the scale. A certain dissolute priest, called Neri Abati, prior of San Piero Scheraggio, false to his family and in concert with the Black chiefs, consented to set fire to the dwellings of his own kinsmen in Orto-san-Michele; the flames, assisted by faction, spread rapidly over the richest and most crowded part of Florence: shops, warehouses, towers, private dwellings and palaces, from the old to the new market- place, from Vacchereccia to Porta Santa Maria and the Ponte Vecchio, all was one broad sheet of fire: more than nineteen hundred houses were consumed; plunder and devastation revelled unchecked amongst the flames, whole races were reduced in one moment to beggary, and vast magazines of the richest merchandise were destroyed. The Cavalcanti, one of the most opulent families in Florence, beheld their whole property consumed, and lost all courage; they made no attempt to save it, and, after almost

250 gaining possession of the city, were finally overcome by the opposite faction."

10. |Macbeth, I. 7:--

It were done quickly."

23. See Parad. XII. 112:--

With mighty virtue, from which I acknowledge

All of my genius, whatso'er it be."

24. I may not balk or deprive myself of this good.

34. The Prophet Elisha, 2 Kings ii. 23:-- "And he went up from thence unto Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord: and there came forth two she-bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them." 35. 2 Kings ii. II:--"And it came to pass, as they still went on and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven."

54. These two sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, were so hostile to each other, that, when after death their bodies were burned on the same funeral pile, the flames swayed apart, and the ashes separated. Statius, Thebaid, XII. 430, Lewis's Tr.:--

Pervades their limbs in many a curling spire,

The vast hill trembles, and the intruder's corse

Is driven from the pile with sudden force.

The flames, dividing at the point, ascend,

And at each other adverse rays extend.

Thus when the ruler of the infernal state,

Pale-visaged Dis, commits to stern debate

The sister-fiends, their brands, held forth to fight, Now clash, then part, and shed a transient light."

56. The most cunning of the Greeks at the siege of Troy, now united in their punishment, as before in warlike wrath.

59. As Troy was overcome by the fraud of the wooden horse, it was in a poetic sense the gateway by which Aeneas went forth to

251 establish the Roman empire in Italy.

62. Deidamia was a daughter of Lycomedes of Sycros, at whose court Ulysses found Achilles, disguised in woman's attire, and enticed him away to the siege of Troy, telling him that, according to the oracle, the city could not be taken without him, but not telling him that, according to the same oracle, he would lose his life there.

63. Ulysses and Diomed together stole the Palladium, or statue of Pallas, at Troy, the safeguard and protection of the city. 75. The Greeks scorned all other nations as "outside barbarians." Even Virgil, a Latian, has to plead with Ulysses the merit of having praised him in the Aeneid.

108. The Pillars of Hercules at the straits of Gibraltar; Abyla on the African shore, and Gibraltar on the Spanish; in which the popular mind has lost its faith, except as symbolized in the columns on the Spanish dollar, with the legend, Plus ultra. Brunetto Latini, Tesor. IX. 119:--

Vidi diritto stare

Gran colonne, le quali

Vi mise per segnali

Ercules il potente,

Per mostrare alla gente

Che loco sia finata

La terra e terminata."

125. |Odyssey, XI. 155: "Well-fitted oars, which are also wings to ships."

127. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, II. 19, Miss Williams's Tr., has this passage: "From the time we entered the torrid zone, we were never wearied with admiring, every night, the beauty of the Southern sky, which, as we advanced toward the south, opened new constellations to our view. We feel an indescribable sensation, when, on approaching the equator, and particularly on passing from on hemisphere to the other, we see those stars, which we have contemplated from our infancy, progressively sink, and finally disappear. Nothing awakens in the traveller a livelier remembrance of the immense distance by which he is separated from his country, than the aspect of an unknown firmament. The grouping of the stars of the first magnitude, some scattered nebulae, rivalling in splendor the milky way, and tracks of space remarkable for their extreme blackness, give a particular

252 physiognomy to the Southern sky. This sight fills with admiration even those who, uninstructed in the branches of accurate science, feel the same emotion of delight in the contemplation of the heavenly vault, as in the view of a beautiful landscape, or a majestic site. A traveller has no need of being a botanist, to recognize the torrid zone on the mere aspect of its vegetation; and without having acquired any notions of astronomy, without any acquaintance with the celestial charts of Flamstead and De la Caille, he feels he is not in Europe, when he sees the immense constellation of the Ship, or the phosphorescent clouds of Magellan, arise on the horizon."

142. Compare Tennyson's Ulysses:--

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me,--

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads,--you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honor and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

`T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and, sitting well in order, smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Canto 27

7. The story of the Brazen Bull of Perillus is thus told in the Gesta Romanorum, Tale 48, Swan's Tr.:-- "Dionysius records, that when Perillus desired to become an

253 artificer of Phalaris, a cruel and tyrannical king who depopulated the kingdom, and was guilty of many dreadful excesses, he presented to him, already too well skilled in cruelty, a brazen bull, which he has just constructed. In one of its sides there was a secret door, by which those who were sentenced should enter and be burnt to death. The idea was, that the sounds produced by the agony of the sufferer confined within should resemble the roaring of a bull; and thus, while nothing human struck the ear, the mind should be unimpressed by a feeling of mercy. The king highly applauded the invention, and said, `Friend, the value of thy industry is yet untried: more cruel even than the people account me, thou thyself shalt be the first victim.'" Also in Gower, Confes. Amant., VII.:--

Among the whiche there was one,

By name which Berillus hight.

And he bethought him how he might

Unto the tirant do liking.

And of his own ymagining

Let forge and make a bulle of bras,

And on the side cast there was

A dore, where a man may inne,

Whan he his peine shall beginne

Through fire, which that men put under.

And all this did he for a wonder,

That when a man for peine cride,

The bull of bras, which gapeth wide,

It shulde seme, as though it were

A bellewing in a mannes ere

And nought the crieng of a man.

But he, which alle sleightes can,

The devil, that lith in helle fast,

Him that it cast hath overcast,

That for a trespas, which he dede,

He was put in the same stede.

And was himself the first of alle,

Which was into that peine falle

That he for other men ordeigneth."

21. Virgil being a Lombard, Dante suggests that, in giving Ulysses and Diomed license to depart, he had used the Lombard dialect, saying, " Issa t' en va." See Canto XXIII. Note 7.

28. The inhabitants of the province of Romagna, of which Ravenna is the capital.

254 29. It is the spirit of Guido da Montefeltro that speaks. The city of Montefeltro lies between Urbino and that part of the Apennines in which the Tiber rises. Count Guido was a famous warrior, and one of the great Ghibelline leaders. He tells his own story sufficiently in detail in what follows.

40. Lord Byron, Don Juan, III. 105, gives this description of Ravenna, with an allusion to Boccaccio's Tale, versified by Dryden under the title of Theodore and Honoria:--

Of the pine forest, and the silent shore

Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood,

Rooted where once the Adrian wave flow'd o'er,

To where the last Caesarean fortress stood,

Ever-green forest! which Boccaccio's lore

And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me,

How have I loved the twilight hour and thee!

Making their summer lives one ceaseless song

Were the sole echoes, save my steed's and mine,

And vesper-bell's that rose the boughs along;

The spectre huntsman o Onesti's line,

His hell-dogs, and their chase, and the fair throng,

Which learned from this example not to fly

From a true lover, showed my mind's eye,"

Dryden's Theodore and Honoria begins with these words:--

Of all the cities in Romanian lands,

The chief, and most removed, Ravenna stands,

Adorned in ancient times with arms and arts,

And rich inhabitants, with generous hearts."

It was at Ravenna that Dante passed the last years of his life, and there he died and was buried.

41. The arms of Guido da Polenta, Lord of Ravenna, Dante's friend, and father (or nephew) of Francesca da Rimini, were an eagle half white in a field of azure, and half red in a field of gold. Cervia is a small town some twelve miles from Ravenna.

43. The city of Forli, where Guido da Montefeltro defeated and slaughtered the French in 1282. See Canto XX. Note 118. 45. A Green lion was the coat of arms of the Ordelaffi, then Lords of

255 Forli.

46. Malatesta, father and son, tyrants of Rimini, who murdered Montagna, a Ghibelline leader. Verrucchio was their castle, near the city. Of this family were the husband and lover of Francesca. Dante calls them mastiffs, becaue of their fierceness, making "wimbles of their teeth" in tearing and devouring.

49. The cities of Faenza on the Lamone, and Imola on the Santerno. They were ruled by Mainardo, surnamed "the Devil," whose coat of arms was a lion azure in a white field.

52. The city of Cesena.

67. Milton, Parad. Lost, III. 479:--

Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised."

70. Boniface VIII., who in line 85 is called "the Prince of the new Pharisees."

81. Dante, Convito IV. 28, quoting Cicero, says: "Natural death is as it were a haven and rest to us after long navigation. And the noble soul is like a good mariner; for he, when he draws near the port, lowers his sails, and enters it softly with feeble steerage. "

86. This Papal war, which was waged against Christians, and not against pagan Saracens, nor unbelieving Jews, nor against the renegades who had helped them at the siege of Acre, or given them aid and comfort by traffic, is thus described by Mr. Norton, Travel and Study in Italy, p. 263:-- "This `war near the Lateran' was a war with the great family of Colonna. Two of the house were Cardinals. They had been deceived in the election, and were rebellious under the rule of Boniface. The Cardinals of the great Ghibelline house took no pains to conceal their ill-will toward the Guelf Pope. Boniface, indeed, accused them of plotting with his enemies for his overthrow. The Colonnas, finding Rome unsafe, had withdrawn to their strong town of Palestrina, whence they could issue forth at will for plunder, and where they could give shelter to those who shared in their hostility toward the Pope. On the other hand, Boniface, not trusting himself in Rome, withdrew to the secure height of Orvieto, and thence, on the 14th of December, 1297, issued a terrible bull for a crusade against them, granting plenary indulgence to all, (such was the Christian temper of the times, and so literally were the violent seizing upon the kingdom of

256 Heaven,) granting plenary indulgence to all who would take up arms against these rebellious sons of the Church and march against their chief stronghold, their ` alto seggio' of Palestrina. They and their adherents had already been excommunicated and put under the ban of the Church; they had been stripped of all dignities and privileges; their property had been confiscated; and they were now by this bull placed in the position o enemies, not of the Pope alone, but of the Church Universal. Troops gathered against them from all quarters of Papal Italy. Their lands were ravaged, and they themselves shut up within their stronghold; but for a long time they held out in their ancient high-walled mountaintown. It was to gain Palestrina that Boniface `had war near the Lateran.' The great church and palace of the Lateran, standing on the summit of the Coelian Hill, close to the city wall, overlooks the Campagna, which, in broken levels of brown and green and purple fields, reaches to the base of the encircling mountains. Twenty miles away, crowning the top and clinging to the side of one of the last heights of the Sabine range, are the gray walls and roofs of Palestrina. It was a far more conspicuous place at the close of the thirteenth century than it is now; for the great columns of the famous temple of Fortune still rose above the town, and the ancient citadel kept watch over it from its high rock. At length, in September, 1298, the Colonnas, reduced to the hardest extremities, became ready for peace. Boniface promised largely. The two Cardinals presented themselves before him at Rieti, in coarse brown dresses, and with ropes around their necks, in token of their repentance and submission. The Pope gave them not only pardon and absolution, but hope of being restored to their titles and possessions. This was the ` lunga promessa con l'attender corto'; for, while the Colonnas were retained near him, and these deceptive hopes held out to them, Boniface sent the Bishop of Orvieto to take possession of Palestrina, and to destroy it utterly, leaving only the church to stand as a monument above its ruins. The work was done thoroughly;--a plough was drawn across the site of the unhappy town, and salt scattered in the furrow, that the land might thenceforth be desolate. The inhabitants were removed from the mountain to the plain, and there forced to build new homes for themselves, which, in their turn, two years afterwards, were thrown down and burned by order of the implacable Pope. This last piece of malignity was accomplished in 1300, the year of the Jubilee, the year in which Dante was in Rome and in which he saw Guy of Montefeltro, the counsellor of Boniface in deceit, burning in Hell."

94. The story of Sylvester and Constantine is one of the legends of the Legenda Aurea. The part of it relating to the Emperor's baptism is thus condensed by Mrs. Jameson in her Sacred and

257 Legendary Art, II. 313:-- "Sylvester was born at Rome of virtuous parents; and at a time when Constantine was still in the darkness of idolatry and persecuted the Christians, Sylvester, who had been elected Bishop of Rome, fled from the persecution, and dwelt for some time in a cavern, near the summit of Monte Calvo. While he lay there concealed, the Emperor was attacked by a horrible leprosy: and having called to him the priests of his false gods, they advised that he should bathe himself in a bath of children's blood, and three thousand children were collected for this purpose. And as he proceeded in his chariot to the place where the bath was to be prepared, the mothers of these children threw themselves in his way with dishevelled hair, weeping, and crying aloud for mercy. Then Constantine was moved to tears, and he ordered his chariot to stop, and he said to his nobles and to his attendants who were around him, "Far better is it that I should die, than cause the death of these innocents!' And then he commanded that the children should be restored to their mothers with great gifts, in recompense of what they had suffered; so they went away full of joy and gratitude, and the Emperor returned to his palace. "On that same night, as he lay asleep, St. Peter and St. Paul appeared at his bedside: and they stretched their hands over him and said, `Because thou hast feared to spill the innocent blood, Jesus Christ has sent us to bring thee good counsel. Send to Sylvester, who lies hidden amoung the mountains, and he shall show thee the pool in which, having washed three times, thou shalt be clean from thy leprosy; and henceforth thou shalt adore the God of the Christians, and thou shalt cease to persecute and to oppress them. ' Then Constantine, awaking from this vision, sent his soldiers in search of Sylvester. And when they took him, he supposed that it was to lead him to death; nevertheless he went cheerfully: and when he appeared before the Emperor, Constantine arose and saluted him, and said, `I would know of thee who are those two gods who appeared to me in the visions of the night?' And Sylvester replied, `They were not gods, but the apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ.' Then Constantine desired that he would show him the effigies of these two apostles; and Sylvester sent for two pictures of St. Peter and St. Paul, which were in the possession of certain pious Christians. Constantine, having behald them, saw that they were the same who had appeared to him in his dream. Then Sylvester baptized him, and he came out of the font cured of his malady. " Gower also, Confes. Amatis, II., tells the story at length: --

A light, as though it were a sunne,

Fro heven into the place come

Where that he toke his christendome,

And ever amonge the holy tales

258

Lich as they weren fisches scales

They fellen from him now and efte,

Till that there was nothing belefte

OF all this grete maladie."

96. Montefeltro was in the Franciscan monastery at Assisi. 102. See Note 86 of this Canto. Dante calls the town Penestrino from its Latin name Praeneste.

105. Pope Celestine V., who made "the great refusal," or abdication of the papacy. See Canto III. Note 59.

118. Gower, Confes. Amantis, II.:--

To him, that woll him nought vertue,

To leve of vice the folie,

For worde is wind, but the maistrie

Is, that a man himself defende

of thing whiche is nought to commende,

Whereof ben fewe now a day."

Canto 28

1. The Ninth Bolgia, in which are punished the Schismatics, and "where is paid the fee By those who sowing discord win their burden"; a burden difficult to describe even with untrammelled words, or in plain prose, free from the fetters of rhyme.

9. Apulia, or La Puglia, is in the southeastern part of Italy, "between the spur and the heel of the boot."

10. The people slain in the conquest of Apulia by the Romans. Of the battle of Maleventum, Livy, X. 15, says:-- "Here likewise there was more of flight than of bloodshed. Two thousand of the Apulians were slain, and Decius, despising such an enemy, led his legions into Samnium."

11. Hannibal's famous battle at Cannae, in the second Punic war. According to Livy, XXII. 49, "The number of the slain is computed at forty thousand foot, and two thousand seven hundred horse." He continues, XXII. 51, Baker's Tr.:"On the day following, as soon as light appeared, his troops applied themselves to the collecting of the spoils, and viewing the carnage made, which was such as shocked even enemies; so many thousand Romans, horsemen and footmen, lay promiscuously on the field, as chance had thrown them together, either in the battle, or flight. Some, whom their

259 wounds, being pinched by the morning cold, had roused from their posture, were put to death by the enemy, as they were rising up, all covered with blood, from the midst of the heaps of carcasses. Some they found lying alive, with their thighs and hams cut, who, stripping their necks and throats, desired them to spill what remained of their blood. Some were found, with their heads buried in the earth, in holes which it appeared they had made for themselves, and covering their faces with earth thrown over them, had thus been suffocated. The attention of all was particularly attracted by a living Numidian with his nose and ears mangled, stretched under a dead Roman, who lay over him, and who, when his hands had been rendered unable to hold a weapon, his rage being exasperated to madness, had expired in the act of tearing his antagonist with his teeth." When Mago, son of Hamilcar, carried the news of the victory to Carthage, "in conformation of his joyful intelligence," says the same historian, XXIII. 12, "he ordered the gold rings taken from the Romans to be poured down in the porch of the senate-house, and of these there was so great a heap that, according to some writers, on being measured, they filled three pecks and a half; but the more general account, and likewise the more probable is, that they amounted to no more than one peck. He also explained to them, in order to show the greater extent of the slaughter, that none but those of equestrian rank, and of these only the principal, wore this ornament."

14. Robert Guiscard, the renowned Norman conqueror of southern Italy. Dante places him in the Fifth Heaven of Paradise, in the planet Mars. For an account of his character and achievements see Gibbon, Ch. LVI. See also Parad. XVIII. Note 20. Matthew Paris, Giles's Tr., I. 171, A.D. 1239, gives the following account of the manner in which he captured the monastery of Monte Cassino:-- "In the same year, the monks of Monte Cassino (where St. Benedict had planted a monastery), to the number of thirteen, came to the Pope in old and torn garments, with dishevelled hair and unshorn beards, and with tears in their eyes; and on being introduced to the presence of his Holiness, they fell at his feet, and laid a complaint that the Emperor had ejected them from their house at Monte Cassino. This mountain was impregnable, and indeed inaccessible to any one unless at the will of the monks and others who dwelt on it; however R. Guiscard, by a device, pretending that he was dead and being carried thither on a bier, thus took possession of the monks' castle. When the Pope heard this, he concealed his grief, and asked the reason; to which the monks replied, `Because, in obedience to you, we excommunicated the Emperor.' The Pope then said, `You obedience shall save you'; on which the monks went away without receiving anything more from

260 the Pope."

16. The battle of Ceperano, near Monte Cassino, was fought in 1265, between Charles of Anjou and Manfred, king of Apulia and Sicily. The Apulians, seeing the battle going against them, deserted their king and passed over to the enemy.

17. The battle of Tagliacozzo in Abruzzo was fought in 1268, between Charles of Anjou and Curradino or Conradin, nephew of Manfred. Charles gained the victory by the strategy of Count Alardo di Valleri, who, "weaponless himself, Made arms ridiculous." This valiant but wary crusader persuaded the king to keep a third of his forces in reserve; and when the soldiers of Curradino, thinking they had won the day, were scattered over the field in pursuit of plunder, Charles fell upon them, and routed them. Alardo is mentioned in the Cento Novelle Antiche, Nov. LVII., as "celebrated for his wonderful prowess even among the chief nobles, and no less esteemed for his singular virtues than for his courage."

31. Gibbon, ch. L., says:"At the conclusion of the Life of Mahomet, it may perhaps be expected that I should balance his faults and virtues, that I should decide whether the title of enthusiast or impostor more properly belongs to that extraordinary man. Had I been intimately conversant with the son of Abdallah, the task would still be difficult, and the success uncertain; at the distance of twelve centuries, I darkly contemplate his shade through a cloud of religious incense; and could I truly delineate the portrait of an hour, the fleeting resemblance would not equally apply to the solitary of Mount Hera, to the preacher of Mecca, and to the conqueror of Arabia... From enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and slippery; the daemon of Socrates affords a memorable instance how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud." Of Ali, the son-in-law and faithful follower of Mahomet, he goes on to say: "He united the qualifications of a poet, a soldier, and a saint; his wisdom still breathes in a collection of moral and religious sayings; and every antagonist, in the combats of the tongue or of the sword, was subdued by his eloquence and valor. From the first hour of his mission to the last rites of his funeral, the apostle was never forsaken by a generous friend, whom he delighted to name his brother, his vice-gerent, and the faithful Aaron of a second Moses."

55. Fra Dolcino was one of the early social and religious reformers in the North of Italy. His sect bore the name of

261 "Apostles," and its chief, if not only, heresy was a desire to bring back the Church to the simplicity of the apostolic times. In 1305 he withdrew with his followers to the mountains overlooking the Val Sesia in Piedmont, where he was pursued and besieged by the Church party, and, after various fortunes of victory and defeat, being reduced by "stress of snow" and famine, was taken prisoner, together with his companion, the beautiful Margaret of Trent. Both were burned at Vercelli on the 1st of June, 1307. This "last act of the tragedy" is thus described by Mr. Mariotti, Historical Memoir of Fra Dolcino and his Times, p. 290:-- "Margaret of Trent enjoyed the precedence due to her sex. She was first led out into a spot near Vercelli, bearing the name of `Arena Servi,' or more properly `Arena Cervi,' in the sands, that is, of the torrent Cervo, which has its confluent with the Sesia at about one mile above the city. A high stake had been erected in a conspicuous part of the place. To this she was fastened, and a pile of wood was reared at her feet. The eyes of the inhabitants of town and country were upon her. On her also were the eyes of Dolcino. She was burnt alive with slow fire. "Next came the turn of Dolcino: he was seated high on a car drawn by oxen, and thus paraded from street to street all over Vercelli. His tormentors were all around him. Beside the car, iron pots were carried, filled with burning charcoals; deep in the charcoals were iron pincers, glowing at white heat. These pincers were continually applied to the various parts of Dolcino's naked body, all along his progress, till all his flesh was torn piecemeal from his limbs: when every bone was bare and the whole town was preambulated, they drove the still living carcass back to the same arena, and threw it on the burning mass in which Margaret had been consumed. " Farther on he adds:-- "Divested of all fables which ignorance, prejudice, or open calumny involved it in, Dolcino's scheme amounted to nothing more than a reformation, not of religion, but of the Church; his aim was merely the destruction of the temporal power of the clergy, and he died for his country no less than for his God. The wealth, arrogance, and corruption of the Papal See appeared to him, as it appeared to Dante, as it appeared to a thousand other patriots before and after him, an eternal hindrance to the union, peace, and welfare of Italy, as it was a perpetual check upon the progress of the human race, and a source of infinite scandal to the piety of earnest believers...true throughout. If we bring the light of even the clumsiest criticism to bear on his creed, even such as it has been summed up by the ignorance of malignity of men who never utter his name without an imprecation, we have reason to be astonished at the little we find in it that may be construed into a wilful deviation from the strictest orthodoxy.

262 Luther and Calvin would equally have repudiated him. He was neither a Presbyterian nor an Episcopalian, but an uncompromising, stanch Papist. His was, most eminently, the heresy of those whom we have designated as `literal Christians.' He would have the Gospel strictly -- perhaps blindly--adhered to. Neither was that, in the abstract, an unpardonable offence in the eys of the Romanism of those times -- witness St. Francis and his early flock--provided he had limited himself to make Gospel-law binding upon himself and his followers only. But Dolcino must needs enforce it upon the whole Christian community, enforce it especially on those who set up as teachers of the Gospel, on those who laid claim to Apostolical succession. That was the error that damned him." Of Margaret he still farther says, referring to some old manuscript as authority:-- "She was known by the emphatic appellation of Margaret the Beautiful. It is added, that she was an orphan, heiress of noble parents, and had been placed for her education in a monastery of St. Catherine in Trent; that there Dolcino --who had also been a monk, or at least a novice, in a convent of the Order of the Humiliati, in the same town, and had been expelled in consequence either of his heretic tenets, or of immoral conduct--succeeded nevertheless in becoming domesticated in the nunnery of St. Catherine, as a steward or agent to the nuns, and there accomplished the fascination and abduction of the wealthy heiress."

59. Val Sesia, among whose mountains Fra Dolcino was taken prisoner, is in the diocese of Novara.

73. A Bolognese, who stirred up dissensions among the citizens. 74. The plain of Lombardy sloping down two hundred miles and more, from Vercelli in Piedmont to Marcabo, a village near Ravenna. 76. Guido del Cassero and Angiolello da Cagnano, two honorable citizens of Fano, going to Rimini by invitation of Malatestino, were by his order thrown into the sea and drowned, as here prophesied or narrated, near the village of Cattolica on the Adriatic.

85. Malatestino had lost one eye.

86. Rimini.

89. Focara is a headland near Catolica, famous for dangerous winds, to be preserved from which mariners offered up vows and prayers. These men will not need to do it; they will not reach that cape.

263 102. Curio, the banished Tribune, who, fleeing to Caesar's camp on the Rubicon, urged him to advance upon Rome. Lucan, Pharsalia, I., Rowe's Tr.:--

Curio, a speaker turbulent and bold,

Of venal eloquence, that served for gold,

And principles that might be bought and sold.

To Caesar thus, while thousand cares infest,

Revolving round the warrior's anxious breast,

His speech the ready orator addressed.

`Haste, then, thy towering eagles on their way;

When fair occasion calls, `t is fatal to delay.'"

106. Mosca degl'Uberti, or dei Lamberti, who, by advising the murder of Buondelmonte, gave rise to the parties of Guelf and Ghibelline, which so long divided Florence. See Canto X. Note 51. 134. Bertrand de Born, the turbulent Troubadour of the last half of the twelfth century, was alike skilful with his pen and his sword, and passed his life in alternately singing and fighting, and in stirring up dissension and strife among his neighbors. He is the author of that spirited war-song, well known to all readers of Troubadour verse, beginning

When flowers and leaves are growing;

And it pleases my heart to hear the swell

Of the birds' sweet chorus flowing

In the echoing wood;

And I love to see, all scattered around,

Pavilions and tents on the martial ground;

And my spirit finds it good,

To see, on the level plains beyond

Gay knights and steeds caparison'd";--

and ending with a challenge to Richard Coeur de Lion, telling his minstrel Papiol to go

That peace already too long has been."

264 it not been for the king of England. He was always at war with all his neighbors, with the Count of Perigueux, and with the Viscount of Limoges, and with his brother Constantine, and with Richard, when he was count of Poitou. He was a good cavalier, and a good warrior, and a good lover, and a good troubadour; and well informed and well spoken; and knew well how to bear good and evil fortune. Whenever he wished, he was master of King Henry of England and of his son; but always desired that father and son should be at war with each other, and one brother with the other. And he always wished that the king of France and the king of England should be at variance; and if there were either peace or truce, straightway he sought and endeavored by his satires to undo the peace, and to show how each was dishonored by it. And he had great advantages and great misfortunes by thus exciting feuds between them. He wrote many satires, but only two songs. The king of Aragon called the songs of Giraud de Borneil the wives of Bertrand de Born's satires. And he who sang for him bore the name of Papiol. And he was handsome and courteous; and called the Count of Britany, Rassa; and the king of England, Yes and No; and his son, the young king, Marinier. And he set his whole heart on fomenting war; and embroiled the father and son of England, until the young king was killed by an arrow in a castle of Bertrand de Born. "And Bertrand used to boast that he had more wits than he needed. And when the king took him prisoner, he asked him, `Have you all your wits, for you will need them now?' And he answered, `I lost them all when the young king died.' Then the king wept, and pardoned him, and gave him robes, and lands, and honors. And he lived long and became a Cistercian monk." Fauriel, Histoire de la Poesie Provenale, Adler's Tr., p. 483, quoting part of this passage, adds:-- "In this notice the old biographer indicates the dominant trait of Bertrand's character very distinctly; it was an unbridled passion for war. He loved it not only as the occasion for exhibiting proofs of valor, for acquiring power, and for winning glory, but also, and even more on account of its hazards, on account of the exaltation of courage and of life which it produced, nay, even for the sake of the tumult, the disorders, and the evils which are accustomed to follow in its train. Bertrand de Born is the ideal of the undisciplined and adventuresome warrior of the Middle Age, rather than that of the chevalier in the proper sense of the term." See also Millot, Hist. Litt. des Troubadours, I. 210, and Hist. Litt. de la France par les Benedictins de St. Maur, continuation, XVII. 425. Bertrand de Born, if not the best of the Troubadours, is the most prominent and striking character among them. His life is a drama full of romantic interest; beginning with the old castle in Gascony, "the dames, the cavaliers, the

265 arms, the loves, the courtesy, the bold emprise"; and ending in a Cistercian convent, among friars and fastings and penitence and prayers.

135. A vast majority of manuscripts and printed editions read in this line, Re Giovanni, King John, instead of Re Giovane, the Young King. Even Boccaccio's copy, which he wrote out with his own had for Petrarca, has Re Giovanni. Out of seventy-nine Codici examined by Barlow, he says, Study of the Divina Commedia, p. 153, "Only five were found with the correct reading--re giovane... The reading re giovane is not found in any of the early editions, nor is it noticed by any of the early commentators." Se also Ginguene, Hist. Litt. de l'Italie, II, 486, where the subject is elaborately discussed, and the note of Biagioli, who takes the opposite side of the question. Henry II. of England had four sons, all of whom were more or less rebellious against him. They were, Henry, surnamed Curt-Mantle, and called by the Troubadours and novelists of his time "The Young King," because he was crowned during his father's life; Richard Coeur-de-Lion, Count of Guienne and Poitou; Geoffroy, Duke of Brittany; and John Lackland. Henry was the only one of these who bore the title of king at the time in question. Bertrand de Born was on terms of intimacy with him, and speaks of him in his poems as lo Reys joves, sometimes lauding, and sometimes reproving him. One of the best of these poems in his Complainte, on the death of Henry, which took place in 1183, from disease, say some accounts, from the bolt of a crossbow say others. He complains that he has lost "the best king that was ever born of mother"; and goes on to say, "King of the courteous, and emperor of the valiant, you would have been Seigneur if you had lived longer; for you bore the name of the Young King, and were the chief and peer of youth. Ay! hauberk and sword, and beautiful buckler, helmet and gonfalon, and purpoint and sark, and joy and love, there is none to maintain them!" See Raynouard, Choix de Poesies, IV. 49. In the Bible Guiot de Provins, Barbazan, Fabliaux et Contes, II. 518, he is spoken of as "li jones Rois, Li proux, li saiges, li cortois." In the Cento Novelle Antiche, XVIII., XIX., XXXV., he is called il Re Giovane; and in Roger de Wendover's Flowers of History, A. D. 1179--1183, "Henry the Young King." It was to him that Bertrand de Born "gave the evil counsels," embroiling him with his father and his brothers. Therefore, when the commentators challenge us as Pistol does Shallow, "Under which king, Bezonian? speak or die!" I think we must answer as Shallow does, "Under King Harry."

137. See 2 Samuel xvii. I, 2:-- "Moreover, Ahithophel said unto Absalom, let me now choose out twelve thousand men, and I will

266 arise and pursue after David this night. And I will come upon him while he is weary and weak-handed, and will make him afraid; and all the people that are with him shall flee; and I will smite the king only." Dryden, in his poem of Absalom and Achitophel, gives this portrait of the latter:--

A name to all succeeding ages curst;

For close designs and crooked counsels fit;

Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;

Restless, unfix'd in principles and place;

In power unpleas'd, impatient of disgrace:

A fiery soul, which, working out its way,

Fretted the pigmy body to decay,

And o'er inform'd the tenement of clay."

Then he puts into the mouth of Archiophel the following

Some royal planet rul'd the southern sky;

Thy longing country's darling and desire;

Their cloudy pillar and their guardian fire;

Their second Moses, whose extended wand

Divides the seas, and shows the promised land;

Whose dawning day, in every distant age,

Has exercised the sacred prophet's rage;

The people's prayer, the glad diviner's theme,

The young men's vision, and the old men's dream."

Canto 29

1. The Tenth and last "cloister of Malebolge," where

Punishes forgers,"

and falsifiers of all kinds. This Canto is devoted to the alchemists.

27. Geri del Bello was a disreputable member of the Alighieri family, and was murdered by one of the Sacchetti. His death was afterwards avenged by his brother, who in turn slew one of the Sacchetti at the door of his house.

29. Bertrand de Born.

267 35. Like the ghost of Ajax in the Odyssey, XI. "He answered me not at all, but went to Erebus amongst the other souls of the dead. " 36. Dante seems to share the feeling of the Italian vendetta, which required retaliation from some member of the injured family. "Among the Italians of this age," says Napier, Florentine Hist., I. Ch. VII., "and for centuries after, private offence was never forgotten until revenged, and generally involved a succession of mutual injuries; vengeance was not only considered lawful and just, but a positive duty, dishonorable to omit; and, as may be learned from ancient private journals, it was sometimes allowed to sleep for five-and-thirty years, and then suddently struck a victim who perhaps had not yet seen the light when the original injury was inflicted."

46. The Val di Chiana, near Arezzo, was in Dante's time marshy and pestilential. Now, by the effect of drainage, it is one of the most beautiful and fruitful of the Tuscan valleys. The Maremma was and is notoriously unhealthy; see Canto XIII. Note 9, and Sardinia would seem to have shared its ill repute.

57. Forgers or falsifiers in a general sense. The "false semblaunt" of Gower, Confes. Amant., II.:--

Above all other it is the welle

Out of the which deceipte floweth."

They are registered here on earth to be punished hereafter. 59. The plague of Aegina is described by Ovid, Metamorph. VII., Stonestreet's Tr.:--

And short thick sighs from panting lungs are drove.

They gape for air, with flatt'ring hopes t'abate

Their raging flames, but that augments their heat.

No bed, no cov'ring can the wretches bear,

But on the ground, exposed to open air,

They lie, and hope to find a pleasing coolness there. The suff'ring earth, with that oppression curst,

Returns the heat which they imparted first.

Here one, with fainting steps, does slowly creep

O'er heaps of dead, and straight augments the heap;

Another, while his strength and tongue prevailed,

Bewails his friend, and falls himself bewailed;

This with imploring looks surveys the skies,

The last dear office of his closing eyes,

But finds the Heav'ns implacable, and dies."

268

The birth of the Myrmidons, "who still retain the thrift of ants, though now transformed to men," is thus given in the same book:--

The same their labor, and their frugal care;

The branches too alike commotion found,

And shook th' industrious creatures on the ground,

Who by degrees (what's scarce to be believed)

A nobler form and larger bulk received,

And on the earth walked an unusual pace,

With manly strides, and an erected face;

Their num'rous legs, and former color lost

The insects could a human figure boast."

88. Latian, or Italian; any one of the Latin race.

109. The speaker is a certain Griffolino, an alchemist of Arezzo, who practised upon the credulity of Albert, a natural son of the Bishop of Siena. For this he was burned; but was "condemned to the last Bolgia of the ten for alchemy."

116. The inventor of the Cretan labyrinth. Ovid, Metamorph. VIII.: --

Who made the draught, and formed the wondrous plan."

Not being able to find his way out of the labyrinth, he made

wings for himself and his son Icarus, and escaped by flight. 122. Speaking of the people of Siena, Forsyth, Italy, 532, says: "Vain, flighty, fanciful, they want the judgment and penetration of their Florentine neighbors; who, nationally severe, call a nail without a head chiodo Sanese. The accomplished Signora Rinieri told me, that her father, while Governor of Siena, was once stopped in his carriage by a crowd at Florence, where the mob, recognizing him, called out: `Lasciate passare il Governatore de' matti.' A native of Siena is presently know at Florence; for his very walk, being formed to a hilly town, detects him on the plain."

125. The persons here mentioned gain a kind of immortality from Dante's verse. The Stricca, or Baldastricca, was a lawyer of Siena; and Niccolo dei Salimbeni, or Bonsignori, introduced the fashion of stuffing pheasants with cloves, or, as Benvenuto says, of roasting them at a fire of cloves. Though Dante mentions them apart, they seem, like the two others named afterwards, to have been members of the Brigata Spendereccia, or Prodigal Club, of Siena, whose extravagances are recorded by Benvenuto da Imola. This club consisted of "twelve very rich young gentlemen, who

269 took it into their heads to do things that would make a great part of the world wonder." Accordingly each contributed eighteen thousand golden florins to a common fund, amounting in all to two hundred and sixteen thousand florins. They built a palace, in which each member had a splendid chamber, and they gave sumptuous dinners and suppers; ending their banquets sometimes by throwing all the dishes, table- ornaments, and knives of gold and silver out of the window. "This silly institution," continues Benvenuto, "lasted only ten months, the treasury being exhausted, and the wretched members became the fable and laughing-stock of all the world." In honor of this club, Folgore da San Geminiano, a clever poet of the day (1260) , wrote a series of twelve convivial sonnets, one for each month of the year, with Dedication and Conclusion. A translation of these sonnets may be found in D. G. Rossetti's Early Italian Poets. The Dedication runs as follows:--

(I know not where, but wheresoe'er, I know,

Lordly and blithe,) be greeting; and thereto,

Dogs, hawks, and a full purse wherein to dip;

Quails struck i' the flight; nags mettled to the whip; Hart-hounds, hare-hounds, and blood-hounds even so;

And o'er that realm, a crown for Niccolo,

Whose praise in Siena springs from lip to lip.

Tingoccio, Atuin di Togno, and Ancaian,

Bartolo, and Mugaro, and Faenot,

Who well might pass for children of King Ban,

Courteous and valiant more than Lancelot,

To each, God speed! How worthy every man

To hold high tournament in Camelot."

136. "This Capocchio," says the Ottimo, "was a very subtle alchemist; and because he was burned for practising alchemy in Siena, he exhibits his hatred to the Sienese, and gives us to understand that the author knew him."

Canto 30

1. In this Canto the same Bolgia is continued, with different kinds of Falsifiers.

4. Athamas, king of Thebes and husband of Ino, daughter of Cadmus. His madness is thus described by Ovid, Metamorph. IV., Eusden's Tr.:--

270

`Here, fellow-hunters, let the toils be spread.

I saw a lioness, in quest of food,

With her two young, run roaring in this wood.'

Again the fancied savages were seen,

As thro' his palace still he chased his queen;

Then tore Learchus from her breast: the child

Streched little arms, and on its father smiled,--

A father now no more,--who now begun

Around his head to whirl his giddy son,

And, quite insensible to nature's call,

The helpless infant flung against the wall.

The same mad poison in the mother wrought;

Young Melicerta in her arms she caught,

And with disordered tresses, howling, flies,

`O Bacchus, Evoe, Bacchus!' loud she cries.

The name of Bacchus Juno laughed to hear,

And said, `Thy foster-god has cost thee dear.'

A rock there stood, whose side the beating waves

Had long consumed, and hollowed into caves.

The head shot forwards in a bending steep,

And cast a dreadful covert o'er the deep.

The wretched Ino, on destruction bent,

Climbed up the cliff,--such strength her fury lent:

Thence with her guiltless boy, who wept in vain,

At one bold spring she plunged into the main."

16. Hecuba, wife of Priam of Troy, and mother of Polyxena and Polydorus. Ovid, XIII., Stanyan's Tr.:--

Transfixed with Thracian arrows strikes her view,

The matrons shrieked; her big swoln grief surpassed

The power of utterance; she stood aghast;

She had nor speech, nor tears to give relief:

Excess of woe suppressed the rising grief.

Lifeless as stone, on earth she fix'd her eyes;

And then look'd up to Heav'n with wild surprise,

Now she contemplates o'er with sad delight

Her son's pale visage; then her aking sight

Dwells on his wounds: she varies thus by turns,

Till with collected rage at length she burns,

Wild as the mother-lion, when among

The haunts of prey she seeks her ravished young:

Swift flies the ravisher; she marks his trace,

And by the print directs her anxious chase.

So Hecuba with mingled grief and rage

Pursues the king, regardless of her age.

271

Fastens her forky fingers in his eyes;

Tears out the rooted balls; her rage pursues,

And in the hollow orbs her hand imbrues.

With darts and stones assail the frantic queen.

She snarls and growls, nor in an human tone;

Then bites impatient at the bounding stone;

Extends her jaws, as she her voice would raise

To keen invectives in her wonted phrase;

But barks, and thence the yelping brute betrays."

31. Griffolino d'Arezzo, mentioned in Canto XXIX. 109.

42. The same "mad sprite," Gianni Schicchi, mentioned in line 32. "Buoso Donati of Florence," says Benvenuto, "although a nobleman and of an illustrious house, was nevertheless like other noblemen of his time, and by means of thefts had greatly increased his patrimony. When the hour of death drew near, the sting of conscience caused him to make a will in which he gave fat legacies to many people; whereupon his son Simon, (the Ottimo says his nephew,) thinking himself enormously aggrieved, suborned Vanni Schicchi dei Cavalcanti, who got into Buoso's bed, and made a will in opposition to the other. Gianni much resembled Buoso." In this will Gianni Schicchi did not forget himself, while making Simon heir; for, according to the Ottimo, he put this clause into it: "To Gianni Schicchi I bequeath my mare." This was the "lady of the herd," and Benvenuto adds, "none more beautiful was to be found in Tuscany; and it was valued at a thousand florins." 61. Messer Adamo, a false-coiner of Brescia, who at the instigation of the Counts Guido, Alessandro, and Aghinolfo of Romena, counterfeited the golden florin of Florence, which bore on one side a lily, and on the other the figure of John the Baptist.

64. Tasso, Gerusalemme, XIII. 60, Fairfax's Tr.:--

Adown their verdant channels gently rolled,

Or falling streams, which to the valleys green,

Distilled from tops of Alpine mountains cold,

Those he desired in vain, new torments been

Augumented thus with wish of comforts old;

Those waters cool he drank in vain conceit,

Which more increased his thirst, increased his heat."

65. The upper valley of the Arno is in the province of Cassentino.

272

Quoting these three lines, Ampere, Voyage Dantesque, 246, says: "In these untranslatable verses, there is a feeling of humid freshness, which almost makes one shudder. I owe it to truth to say, that the Cassentine was a great deal less fresh and less verdant in reality than in the poetry of Dante, and that in the midst of the aridity which surrounded me, this poetry, by its very perfection, made one feel something of the punishment of Master Adam."

73. Forsyth, Italy, 116, says: "The castle of Romena, mentioned in these verses, now stands in ruins on a precipice about a mile from our inn, and not far off is a spring which the peasants call Fonte Branda. Might I presume to differ from his commentators, Dante, in my opinion, does not mean the great fountain of Siena, but rather this obscure spring; which, though less known to the world, was an object more familiar to the poet himself, who took refuge here from proscription, and an image more natural to the coiner who was burnt on the spot. " Ampere is of the same opinion, Voyage Dantesque, 246: "The Fonte Branda, mentioned by Master Adam, is assuredly the fountain thus named, which still flows not far from the tower of Romena, between the place of the crime and that of its punishment." On the other hand, Mr. Barlow, Contributions, remarks: "This little fount was known only to so few, that Dante, who wrote for the Italian people generally, can scarcely be thought to have meant this, when the famous Fonte Branda at Siena was, at least by name, familiar to them all, and formed an image more in character with the insatiable thirst of Master Adam."

Poetically the question is of slight importance; for, as Fluellen says, "There is a river in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmount,...and there is salmons in both."

86. This line and line II of Canto XXIX. are cited by Gabrielle Rossetti in confirmation of his theory of the "Principal Allegory of the Inferno," that the city of Dis is Rome. He says, Spirito Antipapale, I. 62, Miss Ward's Tr.:--

273 `dread seat of Dis.'"

The trench here spoken of is the last trench of Malebolge. Dante mentions no wall about the well; only giants standiing round it like towers.

97. Potiphar's wife.

98. Virgil's "perjured Sinon," the Greek who persuaded the Trojans to accept the wooden horse, telling them it was meant to protect the city, in lieu of the statue of Pallas, stolen by Diomed and Ulysses. Chaucer, Nonnes Preestes Tale:--

That broughtest Troye at utterly to sorwe."

103. The disease of tympanites is so called "because the abdomen is distended with wind, and sounds like a drum when struck." 128. Ovid, Metamorph. III.:--

Nor stained with falling leaves nor rising mud."

Canto 31

1. This Canto describes the Plain of the Giants, between Malebolge and the mouth of the Infernal Pit.

4. Iliad, XVI.: "A Pelion ash, which Chiron gave to his (Achilles') father, cut from the top of Mount Pelion, to be the death of heroes." Chaucer, Squieres Tale:--

For he coude with it bothe hele and drere."

And Shakespeare, in King Henry the Sixth, V. i.:--

Is able with the change to kill and cure."

16. The battle of Roncesvalles,

By Fontarabia."

18. Archbishop Turpin, Chronicle, XXIII., Rodd's Tr., thus

274 describes the blowing or Orlando's horn:--

On Fontarabian echoes borne,

That to King Charles did come,

When Rowland brave, and Oliver,

And every paladin and peer,

On Roncesvalles died!"

Orlando's horn is one of the favorite fictions of old romance, and is surpassed in power only by that of Alexander, which took sixty men to blow it and could be heard at a distance of sixty miles!

41. Montereggione is a picturesque old castle on an eminence near Siena. Ampere, Vogage Dantesque, 251, remarks: "This fortress, as the commentators say, was furnished with towers all round about, and had none in the centre. In its present state it is still very faithfully described by the verse, 'Montereggion de torri si corona.'"

59. This pine-cone of bronze, which is now in the gardens of the Vatican, was found in the mausoleum of Hadrian, and is supposed to have crowned its summit. "I have looked daily", says Mrs. Kemble, Year of Consolation, 152, "over the lonely, sunny gardens, open like the palace halls to me, where the widesweeping orange-walks end in some distant view of the sad and noble Campagna, where silver fountains call to each other through the silent, over-arching cloisters of dark and fragrant green, and where the huge bronze pine, by which Dante measured his great

275 giant, yet stands in the midst of graceful vases and bass-reliefs wrought in former ages, and the more graceful blossoms blown within the very hour." And Ampere, Voyage Dantesque, 277, remarks:

Mr. Norton, Travel and Study in Italy, 253, thus speaks of the same object:

67. "The gaping monotony of this jargon", says Leigh Hunt, "full of the vowel a, is admirably suited to the mouth of the vast half- stupid speaker. It is like a babble of the gigantic infancy of the world."

77. Nimrod, the "mighty hunter before the Lord", who built the tower of Babel, which, according to the Italian popular tradition, was so high that whoever mounted to the top of it could hear the angels sing.

Cory, Ancient Fragments, 51, gives this extract from the Sibylline Oracles:--

276 Beat on the Tower, and to its lowest base Shook it convulsed. And now all intercourse, By some occult and overruling power, Ceased among men: by utterance they strove Perplexed and anxious to disclose their mind; But their lip failed them, and in lieu of words Produced a painful babbling sound: the place Was thence called Babel; by th' apostate crew Named from the event. Then severed far away They sped uncertain into realms unknown; Thus kingdoms rose, and the glad world was filled."

94. Odyssey, XI., Buckley's Tr.:

98. The giant with a hundred hands. Aeneid, X.: "Aegaeon, who, they say, had a hundred arms and a hundred hands, and flashed fire from fifty mouths and breasts; when against the thunder-bolts of Jove he on so many equal bucklers clashed; unsheathed so many swords." He is supposed to have been a famous pirate, and the fable of the hundred hands arose from the hundred sailors that manned his ship.

100. The giant Antaeus is here unbound, because he had not been at "the mighty war" against the gods.

115. The valley of the Bagrada, one of whose branches flows by Zama, the scene of Scipo's great victory over Hannibal, by which he gained his greatest renown and his title of Africanus. Among the neighboring hills, according to Lucan, Pharsalia, IV. , the giant Antaeus had his cave. Speaking of Curio's voyage, he says:--

Where low the once victorious Carthage lay.

There landing, to the well-known camp he hies,

Where from afar the distant seas he spies;

Where Bagrada's dull waves the sands divide,

And slowly downward roll their sluggish tide.

277

From thence he seeks the highest renowned by fame,

And hallowed by the great Cornelian name:

The rocks and hills which long, traditions say,

Where held by huge Antaeus' horrid sway.

But greater deeds this rising mountain grace,

And Scipio's name ennobles much the place,

While, fixing here his famous camp, he calls

Fierce Hannibal from Rome's devoted walls.

As yet the mouldering works remain in view,

Where dreadful once the Latin eagles flew."

124. |Aeneid, VI.: "Here too you might have seen Tityus, the foster-child of all-bearing earth, whose body is extended over nine whole acres; and a huge vulture, with her hooked beak, pecking at his immortal liver." Also Odyssey, XI., in similar words.

Typhoeus was a giant wih a hundred heads, like a dragon's who made war upon the gods as soon as he was born. He was the father of Geryon and Cerberus.

132. The battle between Hercules and Antaeus is described by Lucan, Pharsalia, IV.:--

Antaeus with his mother's dust is strown,

And seeks her friendly force to aid his own."

136. One of the leaning towers of Bologna, which Eustace, Classical Tour, I. 167, thinks are "remarkable only for their unmeaning elevation and dangerous deviation from the perpendicular." Canto 32

1. In this Canto begins the Ninth and last Circle of the Inferno, where Traitors are punished.

Of all the Universe, where Dis is seated,

Whoe'er betrays forever is consumed."

3. The word thrust is here used in its architectural sense, as the thrust of a bridge against its abutments, and the like. 9. Still using the babble of childhood.

11. The Muses; the poetic tradition being that Amphion built the walls of Thebes by the sound of his lyre; and the prosaic interpretation, that he did it by his persuasive eloquence.

278 15. Matthew xxvi. 24: "Woe unto that man by whom the son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born."

28. Tambernich is a mountain of Sclavonia, and Pietrapana another near Lucca.

55. These two "miserable brothers" are Alessandro and Napoleone, sons of Alberto degli Alberti, lord of Falterona in the valley of the Bisenzio. After their father's death they quarrelled, and one treacherously slew the other.

58. Caina is the first of the four divisions of this Circle, and takes its name from the first fratricide.

62. Sir Mordred, son of King Arthur. See La Mort d'Arthure, III. ch. 167: "And there King Arthur smote Sir Mordred under the shield with a foine of his speare throughout the body more than a fadom." Nothing is said here of the sun's shining through the wound, so as to break the shadow on the ground, but that incident is mentioned in the Italian version of the Romance of Launcelot of the Lake, L'illustre e famosa istoria di Lancillotto del Lago, III. ch. 162: "Behind the opening made by the lance there passed through the wound a ray of the sun so manifestly, that Girflet saw it. "

63. Focaccia was one of the Cancellieri Bianchi, of Pistoia, and was engaged in the affair of cutting off the hand of his half-brother. See Note 65, Canto VI. He is said also to have killed his uncle.

65. Sassol Mascheroni, according to Benvenuto, was one of the Toschi family of Florence. He murdered his nephew in order to get possession of his property; for which crime he was carried through the streets of Florence nailed up in a cask, and then beheaded.

68. Camicion de' Pazzi of Valdarno, who murdered his kinsman Ubertino. But his crime will seem small and excusable when compared with that of another kinsman, Carlino de' Pazzi, who treacherously surrendered the castle of Piano in Valdarno, wherein many Florentine exiles were taken and put to death. 81. The speaker is Bocca degli Abati, whose treason caused the defeat of the Guelfs at the famous battle of Montaperti in 1260. See Note 86, Canto X. "Messer Bocca degli Abati, the traitor," says Malispini, Storia, ch. 171, "with his sword in hand, smote and cut off the hand of Messer Jacopo de' Pazzi of Florence, who

279 bore the standard of the cavalry of the Commune of Florence. And the knights and the people, seeing the standard down, and the treachery, were put to rout."

88. The second division of the Circle, called Antenora, from Antenor, the Trojan prince, who betrayed his country by keeping up a secret correspondence with the Greeks. Virgil, Aeneid, I. 242, makes him founder of Padua.

106. See Note 81 of this Canto.

116. Buoso da Duera of Cremona, being bribed, suffered the French cavalry under Guido da Monforte to pass through Lombardy on their way to Apulia, without opposing them as he had been commanded.

117. There is a double meaning in the Italian expression sta fresco, which is well rendered by the vulgarism, left out in the cold, so familiar in American politics.

119. Beccaria of Pavia, Abbot of Vallombrosa, and Papal Legate at Florence, where he was beheaded in 1258 for plotting against the Guelfs.

121. Gianni de' Soldanieri, of Florence, a Ghibelline, who betrayed his party. Villani, VII, 14, says: "Messer Gianni de' Soldanieri put himself at the head of the populace from motives of ambition, regardless of consequences which were injurious to the Ghibelline party, and to his own detriment, which seems always to have been the case in Florence with those who became popular leaders."

122. The traitor Ganellon, or Ganalon, who betrayed the Christian cause at Roncesvalles, persuading Charlemagne not to go to the assistance of Orlando. See Canto XXXI. Note 18. Tebaldello de' Manfredi treacherously opened the gates of Faenza to the French in the night.

130. Tydeus, son of the king of Calydon, slew Menalippus at the siege of Thebes and was himself mortally wounded. Statius, Thebaid, VIII. , thus describes what followed:--

O'ercome with joy and anger, Tydeus tries

To raise himself, and meets with eager eyes

The deathful object, pleased as he surveyed

His own condition in his foe's portrayed.

The severed head impatient he demands,

And grasps with fever in his trembling hands,

While he remarks the restless balls of sight

280

That sought and shunned alternately the light.

Contented now, his wrath began to cease,

And the fierce warrior had expired in peace;

But the fell fiend a thought of vengeance bred,

Unworthy of himself and of the dead.

Meanwhile, her sire unmoved, Tritonia came,

To crown her hero with immortal fame;

But when she saw his jaws besprinkled o'er

With spattered brains, and tinged with living gore,

Whilst his imploring friends attempt in vain

To calm his fury, and his rage restrain,

Again, recoiling from the loathsome view,

The sculptur'd target o'er her face she threw."

Canto 33

1. In this Canto the subject of the preceding is continued. 13. Count Ugolino della Ghererardesca was Podesta of Pisa. "Raised to the highest offices of the republic for ten years," says Napier, Florentine History, I. 318, "he would soon have become absolute, had not his own nephew, Nino Visconte, Judge of Gallura, contested this supremacy and forced himself into conjoint and equal authority; this could not continue, and a sort of compromise was for the moment effected, by which Visconte retired to the absolute government of Sardinia. But Ugolino, still dissatisfied, sent his son to disturb the island; a deadly feud was the consequence, Guelph against Guelph, while the latent spirit of Ghibellinism, which filled the breasts of the citizens and was encouraged by priest and friar, felt its advantage; the Archbishop Ruggiero Rubaldino was its real head, but he worked with hidden caution as the apparent friend of either chieftain. In 1287, after some sharp contests, both of them abdicated, for the sake, as it was alleged, of public tranquillity; but, soon perceiving their error, again united, and, scouring the streets with all their followers, forcibly re-established their authority. Ruggieri seemed to assent quietly to this new outrage, even looked without emotion on the bloody corpse of his favorite nephew, who had been stabbed by Ugolino; and so deep was his dissimulation, that he not only refused to believe the murdered body to be his kinsman's, but zealously assisted the Count to establish himself alone in the government, and accomplish Visconte's ruin. The design was successful; Nino was overcome and driven from the town, and in 1288 Ugolino entered Pisa in triumph from his villa, where he had retired to await the catastrophe. The Archbishop had neglected nothing, and Ugolino found himself associated with this prelate in the public government; events now began to thicken; the Count could not brook a competitor, much

281 less a Ghibelline priest: in the month of July both parties flew to arms, and the Archbishop was victorious. After a feeble attempt to rally in the public palace, Count Ugolino, his two sons, Uguccione and Gaddo, and two young grandsons, Anselmuccio and Brigata, surrendered at discretion, and were immediately imprisoned in a tower, afterwards called the Torre della fame, and there perished by starvation. Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, whose tragic story after five hundred years still sounds in awful numbers from the lyre of Dante, was stained with the ambition and darker vices of the age; like other potent chiefs, he sought to enslave his country, and checked at nothing in his impetuous career; he was accused of many crimes; of poisoning his own nephew, of failing in war, making a disgraceful peace, of flying shamefully, perhaps traitorously, at Meloria, and of obstructing all negotiations with Genoa for the return of his imprisoned countrymen. Like most others of his rank in those frenzied times he belonged more to faction than his country, and made the former subservient to his own ambition; but all these accusations, even if well founded, would not draw him from the general standard; they would only prove that he shared the ambition, the cruelty, the ferocity, the recklessness of human life and suffering, and the relentless pursuit of power in common with other chieftains of his age and country. Ugolino was overcome, and suffered a cruel death; his family was dispersed, and his memory has perhaps been blackened with a darker coloring to excuse the severity of his punishment; but his sons, who naturally followed their parent's fortune, were scarcely implicated in his crimes, although they shared his fate; and his grandsons, though not children, were still less guilty, though one of these was not unstained with blood. The Archbishop had public and private wrongs to revenge, and had he fallen, his sacred character alone would probably have procured for him a milder destiny."

Villani, VII. 128, gives this account of the imprisonment: "The Pisans, who had imprisoned Count Ugolino and his two sons and two grandsons, children of Count Guelfo, as we have before mentioned, in a tower on the Piazza degli Anziani, ordered the door of the tower to be locked, and the keys to be thrown into the Arno, and forbade any food should be given to the prisoners, who in a few days died of hunger. And the five dead bodies, being taken together out of the tower, were ignominiously buried; and from that day forth the tower was called the Tower of Famine, and shall be forever more, For this cruelty the Pisans were much blamed through all the world where it was known; not so much for the Count's sake, as on account of his crimes and treasons he perhaps deserved such a death, but for the sake of his children and grandchildren, who were young and innocent boys; and this

282 sin, committed by the Pisans, did not remain unpunished." Chaucer's version of the story in the Monkes Tale is as follows:

There may no tonge tellen for pitee.

But litel out of Pise stant a tour,

In whiche tour in prison yput was he,

And with him ben his litel children three,

The eldest scarsely five yere was of age:

Alas! fortune, it was gret crueltee

Swiche briddes for to put in swiche a cage.

Dampned was he to die in that prison,

For Roger, which that bishop of Pise,

Had on him made a false suggestion,

Thurgh which the peple gan upon him rise,

And put him in prison, in swiche a wise,

As ye han herd; and mete and drinke he had

So smale, that wel unnethe it may suffise,

And therwithal it was ful poure and bad.

And on a day befell, that in that houre,

Whan that his mete wont was to be brought,

The gailer shette the dores of the toure;

He hered it wel, but he spake right nought.

And in his herte anon ther fell a thought,

That they for hunger wolden do him dien;

Alas! quod he, alas that I was wrought!

Therwith the teres fellen fro his eyen.

His yonge sone, that three yere was of age,

Unto him said fader, why do ye wepe?

Whan will the gailer bringen our potage?

Is ther no morsel bred that ye do kepe?

I am so hungry, that I may not slepe.

Now wolde God that I might slepen ever,

Than shuld not hunger in my wombe crepe;

Ther n'is no thing, sauf bred, that mo were lever.

Thus day by day this childe began to crie,

Till in his fadres barme adoun it lay,

And saide, farewel, fader, I mote die;

And kist his fader, and dide the same day.

And whan the woful fader did it sey,

For wo his armes two he gan to bite,

And saide, alas! fortune, and wala wa!

Thy false whele my wo all may I wite.

His children wenden, that for hunger it was

283

That he his armes gnowe, and not for wo,

And sayden: fader, do not so, alas!

But rather ete the flesh upon us two.

Our flesh thou yaf us, take our flesh us fro,

And ete ynough: right thus they to him seide,

And after that, within a day or two,

They laide hem in his lappe adoun, and deide.

Himself dispeired eke for hunger starf.

Thus ended in this mighty Erl of Pise:

From high estat fortune away him carf.

Of this tragedie it ought ynough suffice;

Who so wol here it in a longer wise,

Redeth the grete poete of Itaille,

That highte Dante, for he can it devise

Fro point to point, not o word wol he faille."

Buti, Commento, says: "After eight days they were removed from prison and carried wrapped in matting to the church of the Minor Friars at San Francesco, and buried in the monument, which is on the side of the steps leading into the church near the gate of the cloister, with irons on their legs, which irons I myself saw taken out of the monument."

22. The remains of this tower," says Napier, Florentine History, I. 319, note, "still exist in the Piazza de' Cavalieri, on the right of the archway as the spectator looks toward the clock." According to Buti it was called the Mew, "because the eagles of the Commune were kept there to moult." Shelley thus sings of it, Poems, III. 91:

Which was the cradle, and is now the grave

Of an extinguished people, so that pity

Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's wave,

There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built

Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave

For bread, and gold, and blood: pain, linked to guilt,

Agitates the light flame of their hours,

Until its vital oil is spent or spilt;

There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers

And sacred domes; each marble-ribbed roof,

The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers

Of solitary wealth! The tempest-proof

Pavilions of the dark Italian air

Are by its presence dimmed,--they stand aloof,

And are withdrawn,--so that the world is bare,

As if a spectre, wrapt in shapeless terror,

284

Amid a company of ladies fair

Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror

Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue,

The life of their sweet eyes, with all its error,

Should be absorbed till they to marble grew."

30. Monte San Giuliano, between Pisa and Lucca. Shelley, Poems, III. 166:

31. The hounds are the Pisan mob; the hunters, the Pisan noblemen here mentioned; the wolf and whelps, Ugolino and his sons. 46. It is a question whether in this line chiavar is to be rendered nailed up or locked. Villani and Benvenuto say the tower was locked, and the keys thrown into the Arno; and I believe most of the commentators interpret the line in this way. But the locking of a prison door, which must have been a daily occurrence, could hardly have caused the dismay here portrayed, unless it can be shown that the lower door of the tower was usually left unlocked. "The thirty lines from Ed io senti' are unequalled," says Landor, Pentameron, 40, by any other continuous thirty in the whole dominions of poetry."

80. Italy; it being an old custom to call countries by the affirmative particle of the language.

82. Capraia and Gorgona are two islands opposite the mouth of the Arno. Ampere, Voyage Dantesque, 217, remarks: "This imagination may appear grotesque and forced if one looks at the map, for the isle of Gorgona is at some distance from the mouth of the Arno, and I had always thought so, until the day when, having ascended the tower of Pisa, I was struck with the aspect which the Gorgona presented from that point. It seemed to shut up the Arno. I then understood how Dante might naturally have had this idea, which had seemed strange to me, and his imagination was justified in my eyes. He had not seen the Gorgona from the Leaning Tower, which did not exist in his time, but from some one of the numerous towers which protected the ramparts of Pisa. This fact alone would be sufficient to show what an excellent interpretation of a poet travelling is."

86. Napier, Florentine History, I. 313: "He without hesitation surrendered Santa Maria a Monte Fuccechio, Santa Croce, and Monte

285 Calvole to Florence; exiled the most zealous Ghibellines from Pisa, and reduced it to a purely Guelphic republic; he was accused of treachery, and certainly his own objects were admirably forwarded by the continued captivity of so many of his countrymen, by the banishment of the adverse faction, and by the friendship and support of Florence. "

87. Thebes was renowned for its misfortunes and grim tragedies, from the days of the sowing of the dragon's teeth by Cadmus, down to the destruction of the city by Alexander, who commanded it to be utterly demolished, excepting only the house in which the poet Pindar was born. Moreover, the tradition runs that Pisa was founded by Pelops, son of King Tantalus of Thebes, although it derived its name from "the Olympic Pisa on the banks of the Alpheus."

118. Friar Alberigo, of the family of the Manfredi, Lords of Faenza, was one of the Frati Gaudenti, or Jovial Friars, mentioned in Canto XXIII. 103. The account which the Ottimo gives of his treason is as follows: "Having made peace with certain hostile fellow- citizens, he betrayed them in this wise. One evening he invited them to supper, and had armed retainers in the chambers round the supper-room. It was in summer-time, and he gave orders to his servants that, when after the meats he should order the fruit, the chambers should be opened, and the armed men should come forth and should murder all the guests. And so it was done. And he did the like the year before at Castello delle Mura at Pistoia. These are the fruits of the Garden of Treason, of which he speaks." Benvenuto says that his guests were his brother Manfred and his (Manfred's) son. Other commentators say they were certain members of the Order of Frati Gaudenti. In 1300, the date of the poem, Alberigo was still living.

120. A Rowland for an Oliver.

124. This division of Cocytus, the Lake of Lamentation, is called Ptolom aea from Ptolomeus, 1 Maccabees xvi. 11, where "the captain of Jericho inviteth Simon and two of his sons into his castle, and there treacherously murdereth them"; for "when simon and his sons had drunk largely, Ptolomee and his men rose up, and took their weapons, and came upon Simon into the banqueting-place, and slew him, and his two sons, and certain of his servants."

Or perhaps from Ptolemy, who murdered Pompey after the battle of Pharsalia.

126. Of the three Fates, Clotho held the distaff, Lachesis spun the thread, and Atropos cut it.

286 Odyssey, XI.:

himself amongst the immortal gods is delighted with banquets, and

has the fair-legged Hebe, daughter of mighty Jove, and golden-

sandalled Juno."

137. Ser Branco d'Oria was a Genoese, and a member of the celebrated Doria family of that city. Nevertheless he murdered at table his father-in-law, Michel Zanche, who is mentioned Canto XXII. 88.

151. This vituperation of the Genoese reminds one of the bitter Tuscan proverb against them: "Sea without fish; mountains without trees; men without faith; and women without shame."

154. Friar Alberigo.

Canto 34

1. The fourth and last division of the Ninth Circle, the Judecca, --

The first line, "The banners of the king of Hell come forth," is a parody of the first line of a Latin hymn of the sixth century, sung in the churches during Passion week, and written by Fortunatus, an Italian by birth, but who died Bishop of Poitiers in 600. The first stanza of this hymn is,--

Fulget crucis mysterium,

Quo carne carnis conditor,

Suspensus est patibulo."

See K,onigsfeld, Latenische Hymnen und Ges,ange aus dem Mittelalter, 64.

18. Milton, Parad. Lost, V. 708:--

The starry flock."

28. Compare Milton's descriptions of Satan, Parad. Lost, I. 192, 589, II. 636, IV. 985:--

With head uplift above the wave, and eyes

287

That sparkling blazed; his other parts besides

Prone on the flood, extended long and large,

Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge

As whom the fables name of monstrous size,

Titanian, or Earth-born, that warred on Jove,

Briareus, or Typhon, whom the den

By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast

Leviathan, which God of all his works

Created hugest that swim the ocean stream:

Him, haply, slumbering on the Norway foam,

The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff,

Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell,

With fixed anchor in his scaly rind

Moors by his side under the lee, while night

Invests the sea, and wished morn delays.

So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay

Chained on the burning lake."

In shape and gesture proudly eminent,

Stood like a tower: his form had yet not lost

All her original brightness, nor appeared

Less than archangel ruined, and the excess

Of glory obscured: as when the sun new-risen

Looks through the horizontal misty air,

Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon,

In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds

On half the nations, and with fear of change

Perplexes monarchs: darkened so, yet shone

Above them all the Archangel."

Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds

Close sailing from Bengala or the isles

Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring

Their spicy drugs: they on the trading flood

Through the wide AEthiopian to the Cape

Ply, stemming nightly toward the pole: so seemed

Far off the flying fiend."

Collecting all his might, dilated stood,

Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremoved:

His stature reached the sky, and on his crest

Sat horror plumed; nor wanted in his grasp

What seemed both spear and shield."

38. The Ottimo and Benvenuto both interpret the three faces as

288 symbolizing Ignorance, Hatred, and Impotence. Others interpret them as signifying the three quarters of the then known world, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

45. Ethiopia; the region about the Cataracts of the Nile.

48. Milton, Parad. Lost, II. 527:--

He spreads for flight, and in the surging smoke

Uplifted spurns the ground."

55. Landor in his Pentameron, 527, makes Petrarca say: "This is atrocious, not terrific nor grand. Alighieri is grand by his lights, not by his shadows; by his human affections, not by his infernal. As the minutest sands are the labors of some profound sea, or the spoils of some vast mountain, in like manner his horrid wastes and wearying minutenesses are the chafings of a turbulent spirit, grasping the loftiest things, and penetrating the deepest, and moving and moaning on the earth in loneliness and sadness."

62. Gabriele Rossetti, Spirito Antipapale, I. 75, Miss Ward's Tr., says:

68. The evening of Holy Saturday.

77. Iliad, V. 305: "With this he struck the hip of AEneas, where the thigh turns on the hip."

289 95. The canonical day, from sunrise to sunset, was divided into four equal parts, called in Italian Terza, Sesta, Nona, and Vespro, and varying in length with the change of season. "These hours, " says Dante, Convito, III. 6, "are short or long...according

as day and night increase or diminish." Terza was the first division after sunrise; and at the equinox would be from six till nine. Consequently mezza terza, or middle tierce, would be half past seven.

114. Jerusalem.

125. The Mountain of Purgatory, rising out of the sea at a point directly opposite Jerusalem, upon the other side of the globe. It is an island in the South Pacific Ocean.

130. This brooklet is Lethe, whose source is on the summit of the Mountain of Purgatory, flowing down to mingle with Acheron, Styx, and Phlegethon, and form Cocytus. See Canto XIV. 136.

138. It will be observed that each of the three divisions of the Divine Comedy ends with the word "Stars," suggesting and symbolizing endless aspiration. At the end of the Inferno Dante "re-beholds the stars"; at the end of the Purgatorio he is "ready to ascend to the stars"; at the end of the Paradiso he feels the power of "that Love which moves the sun and other stars." He is now looking upon the morning stars of Easter Sunday.

WHAT WAS HAPPENING IN THE WORLD WHILE DANTE LIVED

1265 May.

Dante, son of Alighieri degli Alghieri and Bella, is born at Florence. Of his own ancestory he speaks in Paradise, Canto XV. and XVI. In the same year, Manfred, king of Naples and Sicily, is defeated and slain by Charles of Anjou. H. XVII.13, and Purg. II. 110

Guido Novello of Polenta obtains the sovereignty of Ravenna. H. XVII. 38.

Battle of Evesham. Simon de Montfort, leader of the barons, defeated and slain.

1266

290 Two of the Frati Godenti chosen arbitrators of the differences of Florence. H. XXIII. 104

Gianni de' Soldanieri heads the populace in that City. H. XXXII.

118. Roger Bacon sends a copy of his Opus Majus to Pope Clement IV.

1268

Charles of Anjou puts Conradine to death, and becomes king of Naples. H. XXVIII. 16, and Purg. XX. 66.

1270

Louis IX of France dies before Tunis. His widow Beatrice, daughter of Raymond Berenger, lived till 1295. Purg. VII. 126. Par. VI 135.

1272

Guy de Montfort murders Prince Henry, son of Richard, king of the Romans, and nephew of Henry II of England, at Viterbo. H. XII.

119. Richard dies, as is supposed of grief for this event.

Abulfeda, the Arabic writer is born.

Henry III of England is succeeded by Edward I. Purg. VII. 129

1274

Our Poet first sees Beatrice, daughter of Folco Portinari.

Rodolph acknowledged emperor.

Phillip of France marries Mary of Brabant, who lived till 1321. Purg.VI. 24.

Thomas Aquinas dies. Purg. XX.67, and Par. X. 96.

Buonaventura dies. Par. XII. 26.

1275

Pierre de la Brosse, secretary to Phillip III of France,

291 executed. Purg. VI. 23.

1276

Giotto, the painter, is born. Purg. XI. 95.

Pope Adrian V dies. Purg. XIX. 97.

Guido Guinicelli, the poet, dies. Purg. XI. 96, and XXVI. 83.

1277

Pope John XXI dies. Par. XII. 126.

1278

Ottocar, king of Bohemia, dies. Purg. VII. 97.

Robert of Gloucester is living at this time.

1279

Dionysius succeds to the throne of Portugal. Par. XIX. 136.

1280

Albertus Magnus dies. Par X. 95.

Our Poet's firend, Busone da Gubbio, is born about this time.

William of Ockham is born about this time.

1281

Pope Nicholas III dies. H. XIX. 71.

Dante studies at the universities of Bologna and Padua.

About this time Ricordano Malaspina, the Florentine annalist, dies.

1282

The Sicilian vespers. Par. VII. 80.

292 The French defeated by the people of Forli. H. XXVII. 41.

Tribaldello de' Manfredi betrays the city of Faenza. H. XXII. 119.

1284

Prince Charles of Anjou is defeated and made prisoner by Rugier de Lauria, admiral to Peter II of Arragon. Purg. XX. 78.

Charles i, King of Naples, dies. Purg. VII. 111.

Alonzo X of Castile dies. He cause the Bible to be translated into Castillian, and all legal instruments to be drawn up in that language. Sancho IV succeeds him.

1284

Phillip (next year IV of France) marries Jane, daughter of Henry of Navarre. Purg. VII. 102.

1285

Pope Martin IV dies. Purg. XXIV. 23.

Philip III of France and Peter of Arragon die. Purg. VII. 101 and 110. Henry II, king of Cyprus, comes to the Throne. Par. XIX.

144. Simon Memi, the painter, celebrated by Petrarch, is born.

1287

Guido dalle Colonne (mentioned by Dante in his De Vulgari Eloquio) writes "The War of Troy."

Pope Honorius IV dies.

1288

Haquin, king of Norway, makes war on Denmark. Par. XIX. 135.

Count Ugolino de' Gherardeschi dies of famine. H. XXXIII. 14.

The Scottish poet, Thomas Learmouth, commonly called Thomas the Phymer, is living at this time.

293

1289

Dante is in the battle of Campaldino, where the Florentines defeat the people of Arezzo, June 11. Purg. V. 90.

1290

Beatrice dies. Purg. XXII. 2.

He serves in the war waged by the Florentines upon the Pisans, and is present at the surrender of Caprona in the autumn. H. XXI. 92. Guido dalle Conne dies.

William, marquis of Montferrat, is made prisoner by his traitorous subject, at Alessandria in Lombardy. Purg. VII. 133.

Michael Scott dies. H. XX. 115.

1291

Dante marries Gemma de' Donati, with whom he lives unhappily. By this marriage he had five sons and a daughter.

Can Grade della Scala is born, March 9. H. I. 98. Purg. XX. 16 Par. XVII. 75 and XXVII. 135.

The renegade Christians assist the Saracens to recover St. John D'Acre. H. XXVII. 84.

The Emperor Rodolph dies. Purg. VI. 104, and VII. 91.

Alonzo III of Arragon dies, and is succeeded by James II. Purg. VII. 113, and Par. XIX. 133.

Eleanor, widow of Henry II, dies. Par. VI. 135.

1292

Pope Nicholas IV dies.

Roger Bacon dies.

John Baliol, king of Scotland, crowned.

294

1294

Clement V abdicated the papal chair. H. III. 56.

Dante writes his Vita Nuova.

Fra Guittone d'Arezzo, the poet, dies. Pirg. XXIV. 56.

Andrea Taffi, of Florence, the worker in Mossic, dies.

1295

Dante's preceptor, Brunetto Latini, dies. H. XV. 28.

Charles Martel, king of Hungry, visits Florence. Par. VIII. 57, and dies the same year.

Frederick, son of Peter III of Arragon, becomes king of Sicily. Purg. VII 117, and Par. XIX. 127.

Taddeo, the physician of Florence, called the Hippocratean, dies. Par. XII. 77.

Marco Polo, the traveler, returns from the East to Venice.

Ferdinand IV of Castile comes to the throne. Par. XIX. 122.

1296

Forese, the companion of Dante, dies. Purg XXIII. 44.

Sadi, the most celebrated of the Persian writers, dies.

War between England and Scotland, which terminates in the submission of the Scotts to Edward I; but int he following year,

Sir William Wallace attempts the deliverance of Scotland. Par. XIX. 121.

1298

The Emperor Adolphus falls in battle with his rival, Albert I, who succeeds him in the Empire. Purg. VI. 98.

Jacopo da Varagine, archbishop of Genoa, author of the

295 Legenda Aurea, dies.

1300

The Bianca and Mera parties take their rise in Pistoia. H. XXXII. 60.

This is the year in which he supposes himself to see his Vision. H. I. 1. And XXI. 109.

He is chosen chief magistrate, or first of the Priors of Florence; and continues in the office from June 15 to August 15.

Guido Cavalcanti,ost beloved of our Poet's friends, dies. H. X. 59, and Purg. XI. 96.

Cimabue, the painter, dies. Purg. XI. 96.

1301

The Bianca Party expels the Nera from Pistoia. H. XXIV. 142.

1302

January 27. During his absence at Rome, Dante is mulcted by his fellow-citizens in the come of 8,000 lire, and condemned to two years banishment. March 10. He is sentencd, if taken, to be burned.

Fulcieri de' Calboli commits great atrocities on certain of the Ghibelline party. Purg. XVI 61.

Carlino de' Pazzi betrays the castle di Piano Travigne, in Valdarno, to the Florentines. He. XXXII. 67.

The French vanquished in the battle of Coufgfal. Purg. XX. 47

James, King of Majorca and Minorea, dies. Par. XIX. 133.

1303

Pope Boniface VIII dies. H. XIX. 55. Purg. XX. 86. ; XXXII. 146, and Par. XXVII.

The other exiles appoint Dante one of a council of twelve, under Alessandro da Romena.

296

He appears to have been much dissatisfied with his colleagues. Par. XVII. 61.

Robert of Brunne translates into English verse the Manuel de Peches, a treatise written in French by Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln.

1304

Dante joins with the exiles in an unsuccessful attack on the city of Florence.

May. The bridge over the Arno breaks down during a representation of the infernal torments exhibited on that river. H. XXVI. 9.

July 20. Petrarch,whose father had been banished two years before from Florence, is born in Arezzo.

1305

Winceslaus II, king of Bohemia, dies. Purg. VII. 99 and Par. XIX. 123.

A conflagration happens at Florence. H. XXVI. 9.

Sir William Wallace is executed at London.

1306

Dante visits Padua.

1307

He is in Lunigians with the Marchese Marcello Malaspina. Purg. VII. 133; XIX. 140.

Dolcino, the fanatic is burned. H. XXVIII. 53.

Edward II of England comes to the throne.

1308

The Emperor Albert I murdered. Purg. VI. 98, and Far. XIX. 114.

297

Corso Donati, Dante's political enemy, slain. Purg. XXIV. 81. He seeks an asylum at Verona, under the roof of the Signori della Scala, Par. XVII. 69.

He wanders, about this time. Over various parts of Italy. See his Convito. He is at Paris a second time; and, according to one of the early commentators, visits Oxford.

Robert, the patron of Petrarch, is crowned king of Sicily. Par. IX. 2.

Duns Scotus dies. He was born about the same time as Dante.

1309

Charles II, king of Naples, dies. Par. XIX. 125.

1310

The order of the Templars abolished. Pur. XX. 94.

Jean de Meun, the continuer of the Roman de la Rose, dies about this time.

Pier Crescensi of Bologna writes his book on agriculture, in Latin.

1311

Fra Giordan da Rivalta, of Pisa, a Dominican, the author of sermons esteemed for the purity of the Tuscan language, dies.

1312

Robert, king of Sicily, opposes the coronation of the Emperor

Henry VII. Par. VIII. 59.

Ferdinand IV of Castile dies, and is succeded by Alonzo XI. Dino

Compagni, a distinguished Florentine, concluded his history of his own time, written in elegant Italian.

1313

The Emporor Henry of Luxemburgh, bu whom he had hoped

298 to be restored to Florence, dies.

Par. XVII. 80, and XXX. 133.

Henry is succeeded by Lewis of Bavaria.

Dante takes refuge at Ravenna, with Guido Novello da Polenta.

Giovanni Boccaccio is born.

Pope Clememnt V dies. H. XIX. 86, and Par. XXVII 53, and XXX. 141.

1314

Philip IV of France dies. Purg. VII. 108, and Par. XIX. 117.

1314

Louis X Succeeds.

Ferdinand IV of Spain dies. Par. XIX. 122.

Giacopo da Carrara defeated by Can Grande, who makes himself master of Vicenza. Par. IX. 45.

1315

Louis X of France Marries Clemenza, sister to our Poet's friend, Charles Martel, King of {?}Hungary. Par. IX. 2.

1316

Louis X of France dies, and is succeeded by Philip V.

John XXIV elected Pope. Par. XXVII. 53.

Joinville, tghe French Historian, dies about this time.

1320

About this time John Gower is born, eight years before his friend Chaucer.

299 1321 July.

Dante dies at Ravenna, of a complaint brought on by disappointment at his failure in a negotiation which he had been conducting witht he "Venetians, for his patron Guido Novella da Polenta.

His obsequies are sumptuously performed at Ravenna by Guido, who himself died in the ensuing year.

THE ARGUMENT

(Or The Prose Story in Brief) of That Part of "The Divine Comedy" Which is called "Hell"

Canto 1. The writer, having lost his way in a gloomy forest, and being hindered by certain wild beasts from ascending a mountain, is met by Virgil, who promises to show him the punishments of Hell, and afterward of Purgatory; and that he shall then be conducted by Beatrice into Paradise. He follows the Roman poet.

Canto 2 After the invocation, which poets are used to prefix to their works, he shows that, on a consideration of his own strength, he doubted whether it sufficed for the journey proposed to him, but that, being comforted by Virgil, he at last took courage, and followed him as his guide and master.

Canto 3 Dante, following Virgil, comes to the gate of Hell; where, after having read the dreadful words that are written thereon, they both enter. Here, as he understands from Virgil, those were punished who passed their time (for living it could not be called in a state of apathy and indifference both to good and evil. Then pursuing their way, they arrive at the river Acheron; and there find the old ferryman Charon, who takes the spirits over to the opposite shore; which as soon as Dante reaches, he is seized with terror, and falls into a trance.

Canto 4 The Poet, being roused by a clap of thunder and following his guide, onward, descends into Limbo, which is the first circle of Hell, where he finds the souls of those, who although they have lived virtuously and have not to suffer for great sins, nevertheless, through lack of baptism, merit not the bliss of Paradise. Hence he is led on by Virgil to descend into the second circle.

300 Canto 5 Coming tot he seconds circle of Hell, Dante at the entrance beholds Minos the Infernal Judge, by whom he is admonished to beware how he enters those regions. Here he witnesses the punishment of carnal sinners, who are tossed about ceaselessly in the dark air by the most furious winds. Among these, he meets with Fracesca of Rimini, through pity at whose sad tale he falls fainting to the ground.

Canto 6 On his recovery, the Poet finds himself in the third circle, where the gluttonous are punished. Their torment is, to lie in the mire, under a continual and heavy storm of hail, snow and discolored water; Cerberus meanwhile barking over them with his threefold throat, and rending them piecemeal. One of these, who on earth was named Ciacco, foretells the division with which Florence is about to be distracted. Dante proposes a question to his guide, who solves it; and they proceed toward the fourth circle.

Canto 7 In the present Canto, Date described his descent into the fourth circle, at the beginning of which he sees Plutus stationed. Here one like doom awaits the prodigal and the avaricious; which is, to meet in direful conflict, rolling great weights against each other with mutual upbraiding. From hence Virgil takes occasion to show how vail the goods that are committed into the charge of Fortune; and this moves our author to inquire what being that Fortune is, of whom he speaks; hich question being resolved, they go down into the fifth circle, where they find the wrathful and gloomy tormented in the Stygian Lake. Having made a compass round a great part of this lake, they come at last to the base of a lofty towner.

Canto 8 A signal having been made from the tower, Phlegyas, the ferryman of the lake, speedily crosses it, and conveys Virgil and Dante to the other side. On their passage, they meet with Filippe Argenti, whose fury and torment are described. Then they arrive at the city of Dis, the entrance whereto is denied, and the portals closed against them by many Demons.

Canto 9 After some hindrances, and having seen the hellish furies and other monsters, the Poet, by the help of an angle, enters the city of Dis, wherein he discovers that heretics are punished in tombs burning with intense fire; and he, together with Virgil, passes onward between the sepulchers and walls of the city.

Canto 10 Dante having obtained permission from his guide, holds discourse with Farinata degli Uberti and Cavalcante Cavalcanti, who lie in their fiery tombs that are yet open, and not to be

301 closed up till after the last judgement. Farinata predicts the Poet's exile from Florence; and shows him that the condemned have knowledge of future things, but are ignorant of what is at present passing, unless it be revealed by some new-comer from earth.

Canto 11 Dante arrives at the verge of a rocky precipice which incloses the seventh circle, where he sees the sepulcher of Anastasius the Heretic; behind the lid of which, pausing a little, to make himself capable by degrees of enduring the fetid smell that steamed upward from the abyss, he is instructed by Virgil concerning the manner in which the three following circles are disposed, and what description of sinners is punished in each. He then inquires the reason why the carnal, the gluttonous, the avaricious and prodigal, the wrathful and gloomy, suffer not their punishments within the city of Dis. He next asks how the crime of usury is an offense against God; and at length the two Poets go toward the place from whence a passage leads down to the seventh circle.

Canto 12 Descending by a very rugged way into the seventh circle, where the violent are punished, Dante and his leader find it guarded by the minotaur; whose fury being pacified by Virgil, they step downward from crag to crag; till, drawing near the bottom, they descry a river of blood, wherein are tormented such as have committed violence against their neighbor. At these, when they strive to emerge from the brook, a troop of Centaurs, running along the side of the river, aim their arrows; and three of their band opposing our travelers at the foot of their band opposing our travelers at the foot of the steep, Virgil prevails so far, that one consents to carry them both across the stream; and on their passage Dante is informed by him of the course of the river, and of those that are punished therein.

Canto 13 Still in the seventh circle, Dante enters its second compartment, which contains both those who have done violence on their own persons and those who have violently consumed their goods; the first changed into rough and knotted trees whereon the harpies build their nests, the latter chased and turn by black female mastiffs. Among the former, Piero delle Vigne is one who tells him the cause of his having committed suicide, and moreover in what manner the souls are transformed into those trunks. Of the latter crew, he recognizes Lano, a Siennese and Giacomo, a Paduan: and lastly, a Florentine, who had hung himself from his own roof, speaks to him of the calamities of his countrymen.

Canto 14 They arrive at the beginning of the third of those

302 compartments into which this seventh circle is divided. It is a plain of dry and hot sand, where three kinds of violence are punished: namely, against God, against Nature, and against Art; and those who have thus sinned are tormented by flakes of fire, which are eternally showering down upon them. Among the violent against God is found Capaneus whose blasphemies they hear. Next, turning to the left along the forest of self-slayers, and having journeyed a little onward, they meed with a streamlet of blood that issue from the forest and traverses the sandy plain. Here Virgil speaks to our Poet a huge ancient statue that stands within Mount Ida in Crete, from a fissure in which statue there is a dripping of tears, from which the said streamlet, together with the tree other infernal rivers are formed.

Canto 15 Taking their way upon one of the mounds by which the streamlet, spoken of in the last Canto, was embanked, and having gone so far that they could no longer have discerned the forest if they had turned round to look for it, they meet a troop of spirits that come along the sand by the side of the pier. These are they who have done violence by Nature; and among them Dante distinguishes Brunetto Latini, who had been formerly his master; with whom, turning a little backward, he holds a discourse which occupies the reminder of this Canto.

Canto 16 Journeying along the pier, which crosses the sand, they are now so near the end of it as to hear the noise of the stream falling to the eighth circle, when they meet the spirits of three military men; who judging Dante, from his dress, to be a countryman of theirs, entreat him to stop. He complies, and speaks with them. The two Poets then reach the place where the water descends, being the termination of this third compartment in the seventh circle; and here Virgil having thrown down into the hollow a cord, wherewith Dante was girt, they behold at that signal a monstrous and horrible figure come swimming up to them.

Canto 17 The monster Geryon is described; to whom while Virgil is speaking in order that he may carry them both down to the next circle, Dante, by permission, goes a little further along the edge of the void, to descry the third species of sinners contained in this compartment, namely, those who have done violence to Art; and then returning to his master they both descend, seated on the back of Geryon.

Canto 18 The Poet describes the situation and form of the eighth circle, divided into ten gulfs, which contain as many different

303 descriptions of fraudulent sinners; but in the present Canto he treats only of two sorts; but in the present Canto he treats only of two sorts: the first is of those who, either for their own pleasure or for that of another, have seduced any woman from her duty; and these are scourged of demons in the first gulf; the other sort is of flatterers, who in the second gulf are condemned to remain immersed in filth.

Canto 19 They come to the third gulf, wherein are punished those who have been guilty of simony. These are fixed with the head downward in certain apertures, so that no more of them than the legs appears without, and on the soles of their feet are seen furling flames. Dante is taken down by his guide into the bottom of the gulf; and there finds Pope Nicholas the fifth, whose evil deeds, together with those of the other pontiffs, are bitterly reprehended. Virgil then carries him up against to the arch, which affords them a passage over the following gulf.

Canto 20 The Poet relates the punishment of such as presumed, while living, to predict future events. It is to have their faces reversed and set contrary way on their limbs, so that, being deprived of the power to see before them, they are constrained ever to walk backward. Among these Virgil points out to him Amphiaraus, Tiresias, Aruns, and Manto (from the mention of whom he takes occasion to speak of the origin of Mantua), together with several others, who had practiced the arts of divination and astrology.

Canto 21 Still in the eighth circle, which bears the name of Malebolge, they look down from the bridge that passes over its fifth gulf, upon the barterers or public peculators. These are plunged in a lake of boiling pitch, and guarded by Demons, to whom Virgil, leaving Dante apart, presents himself; and license being obtained to pass onward, both pursue their way.

Canto 22 Virgil and Dante proceed, accompanied by the Demons, to see other sinners of the same description in the same gulf. The device of Ciampolo, one of these to escape from the Demons, who had laid hold on him.

Canto 23 The enraged Demons pursue Dante, but he is preserved from them by Virgil. On reaching the sixth gulf, he beholds the punishment of the hypocrites; which is, to pace continually round the gulf under the pressure of caps and bonds, that are gilt on the outside, but leaden within. He is addressed by two of these, Catalano and Loderingo, knights of Saint Mary, otherwise called Joyous Friars of Bologna. Calaphas is seen fixed to a cross on the ground and lies so stretched along the way, that all tread on

304 him i n passing.

Canto 24 Under the escort of his faithful master, Dante not without difficulty makes his way out of the sixth gulf; and in the seventh, see the robbers tormented by venomous and pestilent serpents. The soul of Vanni Fucci, who had pillaged the sacristy of Saint James in Pistola, predicts some calamities that impended over that city, and over the Florentines.

Canto 25 The sacrilegious Fucci vents his fury in blasphemy, is seized by serpents, and flying is pursued by Cacus in the form of a Centaur, who is described with a swarm of serpents on his haunch, and a dragon on his shoulders breathing forth fire. Our Poet then meets with the spirits of three of his countrymen, two of who undergo a marvelous transformation in his presence.

Canto 26 Remounting by the steps, down which they had descended to the seventh gulf, they go forward to the arch that stretches over the eighth, and from thence behold numberless flames wherein are punished evil counsellors, each flame containing a sinner, save one, in which were Diomede and Ulysses, the latter relates the manner of his death.

Canto 27 The Poet, treating of the same punishment as in the last Canto, relates that he turned toward a flame in which was the Count Guido da Montefeltro, whose inquiries respecting the state of Romagna he answers, and Guido is thereby induced to declare who he is, and who condemned to that torment.

Canto 28 They arrive in the ninth gulf, where the sowers of scandal, schismatics, and heretics, are seen with their limbs miserable maimed or divided in different ways. Among these the Poet finds Mahomet, Piero da Medicina, Curio, Mosca, and Bertrand de Born.

Canto 29 Dante, at the desire of Virgil, proceeds onward to the bridge that crosses the tenth gulf, from whence he hears the cries of the alchemists and forgers, who are tormented therein; but not being able to discern anything on account of the darkness, they descend the rock, that bounds this the last of the compartments in which the eighth circle is divided, and then behold the spirits who are afflicted by divers plagues and diseases. Two of them, namely, Grifolion of Arezzo and Capocchio of Sienna, are introduced speaking.

Canto 30 In the same gulf, other kinds of impostures, as those who have counterfeited the persona of others, or debased

305 the current coin, or deceived by speech under false pretenses, are described as suffering various diseases. Sinon of Troy, and Adamo of Brescia, mutually reproach each other with their various impostures.

Canto 31 The poets, following the sound of a loud horn, are led by it to the ninth circle, in which there are four rounds, one incised within the other, and containing as many sorts of Traitors; but the present Canto shows only that the circle is encompassed with Giants, one of whom Antaeus, takes them both in his arms and places them at the bottom of the circle.

Canto 32 This Canto treats of the first, and, in part, of the second of those rounds, into which the ninth and last, or frozen circle, is divided. In the former, called Caina, Date finds Camiccione de' Pazzi, who gives him an account of the sinners who are there punished; and in the next, named Antenora, he hears in like manner from Bocca degi Abbati who his fellow-sufferers are.

Canto 33 The Poet is told by Count Ugolino de' Cherardeschi of the cruel manner in which he and his children were famished in the tower at Pisa, by command of the Archbishop Ruggieri. He next discourses of the third round, called Ptolomea, wherein those are punished who have betrayed others under the semblance of kindness; and among these he finds the Friar Alberigo de' Manfredi, who tells him of one whose soul was already tormented in that place, though his body appeared still to be alive upon the earth, being yielded up to the governance of a fiend.

Canto 34 In the fourth and last round of the ninth circle, those who have betrayed their benefactors are wholly covered with ice. And in the midst is Lucifer, at whose back Dante and Virgil ascend, till by a secret path they reach the surface of the other hemisphere of the earth, and once more obtain sight of the stars.

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