[Footnote 47: 

  “Tal volta un animal coverto broglia
  Si che l’ affetto convien che si paia
  Per lo seguir che face a lui la ’nvoglia.”

A natural, but strange, and surely not sufficiently dignified image for the occasion.  It is difficult to be quite content with a former one, in which the greetings of St. Peter and St. James are compared to those of doves murmuring and sidling round about one another; though Christian sentiment may warrant it, if we do not too strongly present the Apostles to one’s imagination.]

[Footnote 48: 

  “Tal ne la sembianza sua divenne,
  Qual diverebbe Giove, s’ egli e Marte
  Fossero augelli e cambiassersi penne.”

Nobody who opened the Commedia for the first time at this fantastical image would suppose the author was a great poet, or expect the tremendous passage that ensues!]

[Footnote 49:  In spite of the unheavenly nature of invective, of something of a lurking conceit in the making an eclipse out of a blush, and in the positive bathos, and I fear almost indecent irrelevancy of the introduction of Beatrice at all on such an occasion, much more under the feeble aspect of one young lady blushing for another,—­this scene altogether is a very grand one; and the violence itself of the holy invective awful.

A curious subject for reflection is here presented.  What sort of pope would Dante himself have made?  Would he have taken to the loving or the hating side of his genius?  To the St. John or the St. Peter of his own poem?  St. Francis or St. Dominic?—­I am afraid, all things considered, we should have had in him rather a Gregory the Seventh or Julius the Second, than a Benedict the Eleventh or a Ganganelli.  What fine Church-hymns he would have written!]

[Footnote 50:  She does not see (so blind is even holy vehemence!) that for the same reason the denouncement itself is out of its place.  The preachers brought St. Anthony and his pig into their pulpits; she brings them into Heaven!]

[Footnote 51: 

  “Certo io credo
  Che solo il suo fattor tutta la goda.” ]

[Footnote 52:  The Emperor Henry of Luxembourg, Dante’s idol; at the close of whose brief and inefficient appearance in Italy, his hopes of restoration to his country were at an end.]

[Footnote 53:  Pope Clement the Fifth.  Dante’s enemy, Boniface, was now dead, and of course in Tartarus, in the red-hot tomb which the poet had prepared for him.]

[Footnote 54:  Boniface himself.  Pope Clement’s red hot feet are to thrust down Pope Boniface into a gulf still hotter.  So says the gentle Beatrice in Heaven, and in the face of all that is angelical!]

[Footnote 55:  David.]

[Footnote 56:  The Trinity.]

[Footnote 57:  The Incarnation.]

[Footnote 58:  In the Variorum edition of Dante, ut sup. vol. iii. p. 845, we are informed that a gentleman of Naples, the Cavaliere Giuseppe de Cesare, was the first to notice (not long since, I presume) the curious circumstance of Dante’s having terminated the three portions of his poem with the word “stars.”  He thinks that it was done as a happy augury of life and renown to the subject.  The literal intention, however, seems to have been to shew us, how all his aspirations terminated.]