SOURCE: “Preliminary Chapter” in Readings on the Purgatorio of Dante, Vol. I, Methuen & Co., 1907, pp. xxvii-xxxviii.

In the following essay, Vernon discusses the three divisions of Purgatory (Ante-Purgatory, Purgatory Proper, and The Terrestrial Paradise), the time occupied in passing through Purgatory, and the date Dante created the work.

I.

Description of Purgatory.

The Mountain of Purgatory, as described by Dante, is an immense truncated cone, rising out of the midst of the sea in the centre of the Southern Hemisphere, which, according to the Ptolemaic system of Cosmography, consisted, with the exception of the mountain in question, of a vast ocean. Purgatory is supposed to be situated at the exact antipodes to Jerusalem, and to have been formed by the fall of Lucifer, which in Readings on the Inferno (2nd ed., vol. ii, pp. 656, 657), is thus described:—

“In the headlong velocity with which Lucifer was hurled down from...