94 . Many critics, and foremost among them Padre Pompeo Venturi, blame Dante for mingling together things Pagan and Christian. But they should remember how through all the Middle Ages human thought was wrestling with the old traditions; how many Pagan observances passed into Christianity in those early days; what reverence Dante had for Virgil and the classics; and how many Christian nations still preserve some traces of Paganism in the names of the stars, the months, and the days. Padre Pompeo should not have forgotten that he, though a Christian, bore a Pagan
Dante – Divine Comedy (Inferno)
160 name, which perhaps is as evident a brutto miscuglio in a learned Jesuit, as any which he has pointed out in Dante. Upon him and other commentators of the Divine Poem, a very amusing chapter might be written. While the great Comedy is going on upon the scene above, with all its pomp and music, these critics in the pit keep up such a perpetual wrangling among themselves, as seriously to disturb the performance. Biaglioli is the most violent of all, particularly against Venturi, whom he calls an "infamous dirty dog," sozzo can vituperato, an epithet hardly permissible in the most heated literary controversy. Whereupon in return Zani de' Ferranti calls Biagioli "an inurbane grammarian," and a "most ungrateful ingrate."--quel grammatico inurbano...ingrato ingratissimo. Any one who is desirous of tracing out the presence of Paganism in Christianity will find the subject amply discussed by Middleton in his Letter from Rome.
109. Dryden's Aene,is, B. VI.:--
"His eyes like hollow furnaces on fire."
112 . Homer, Iliad, VI.:"As is the race of leaves, such is that of men; some leaves the wind scatters upon the ground, and others the budding wood produces, for they come again in the season of Spring. So is the race of men, one springs up and the other dies." See also Note 82 of the canto. Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III. 160, says:--
When Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of Acheron `as dead leaves flutter from a bough,' he gives the most perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an instant losing his own clear perception that these are souls, and those are leaves: he makes no confusion of one with the other." Shelley in his Ode to the West Wind inverts this image, and compares the dead leaves to ghosts:--
"O wild West Wind! thou breath of Autumn's being! Thou from whose presence the leaves dead Are driven like ghosts, from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken mulititudes."
Canto 4
1. Dante is borne across the river Acheron in his sleep, he does not tell us how, and awakes on the brink of "the dolorous valley
Dante – Divine Comedy (Inferno)
161 of the abyss." He now enters the First Circle of the Inferno; the Limbo of the Unbaptized, the border land, as the name denotes. Frate Alberico in {paragraph} 2 of his Vision says, that the divine punishments are tempered to extreme youth and old age. "Man is first a little child, then grows and reaches adolescence, and attains to youthful vigor; and, little by little growing weaker, declines into old age; and at every step of life the sum of his sins increases. So likewise the little children are punished least, and more and more the adolescents and the youths; until, their sins decreasing with the long-continued torments, punishment also begins to decrease, as if by a kind of old age ("veluti quadam senectute ")."