of Milton, who placed misery in the upbraidings of conscience, in mental torture rather than bodily, in the everlasting pride and rebellion of the followers of Satan and his fallen angels.  It was these awful views of protracted and eternal physical torments,—­not the hell of the Bible, but the hell of priests, of human invention,—­which gives to the Middle Ages a sorrowful and repulsive light, thus nursing superstition and working on the fears of mankind, rather than on the conscience and the sense of moral accountability.  But how could Dante have represented the ideas of the Middle Ages, if he had not painted his Inferno in the darkest colors that the imagination could conceive, unless he had soared beyond what is revealed into the unfathomable and mysterious and unrevealed regions of the second death?

After various wanderings in France and Italy, and after an interval of three years, Dante produced the second part of the poem,—­the Purgatorio,—­in which he assumes another style, and sings another song.  In this we are introduced to an illustrious company,—­many beloved friends, poets, musicians, philosophers, generals, even prelates and popes, whose deeds and thoughts were on the whole beneficent.  These illustrious men temporarily expiate the sins of anger, of envy, avarice, gluttony, pride, ambition,—­the great defects which were blended with virtues, and which are to be purged out of them by suffering.  Their torments are milder, and amid them they discourse on the principles of moral wisdom.  They utter noble sentiments; they discuss great themes; they show how vain is wealth and power and fame; they preach sermons.  In these discourses, Dante shows his familiarity with history and philosophy; he unfolds that moral wisdom for which he is most distinguished.  His scorn is now tempered with tenderness.  He shows a true humanity; he is more forgiving, more generous, more sympathetic.  He is more lofty, if he is not more intense.  He sees the end of expiations:  the sufferers will be restored to peace and joy.

But even in his purgatory, as in his hell, he paints the ideas of his age.  He makes no new or extraordinary revelations.  He arrives at no new philosophy.  He is the Christian poet, after the pattern of his age.

It is plain that the Middle Ages must have accepted or invented some relief from punishment, or every Christian country would have been overwhelmed with the blackness of despair.  Men could not live, if they felt they could not expiate their sins.  Who could smile or joke or eat or sleep or have any pleasure, if he thought seriously there would be no cessation or release from endless pains?  Who could discharge his ordinary duties or perform his daily occupations, if his father or his mother or his sister or his brother or his wife or his son or his daughter might not be finally forgiven for the frailties of an imperfect nature which he had inherited?  The Catholic Church, in its benignity,—­at what