from it to an amount not to be conceived till the arrival of that day.  Dante, meantime, with an impartiality which has been admired by those who can approve the assumption of a theological tyranny at the expense of common feeling and decency, has put friends as well as foes into hell:  tutors of his childhood, kinsmen of those who treated him hospitably, even the father of his beloved friend, Guido Cavalcante—­the last for not believing in a God:  therein doing the worst thing possible in behalf of the belief, and totally differing both with the pious heathen Plutarch, and the great Christian philosopher Bacon, who were of opinion that a contumelious belief is worse than none, and that it is far better and more pious to believe in “no God at all,” than in a God who would “eat his children as soon as they were born.”  And Dante makes him do worse; for the whole unbaptised infant world, Christian as well as Pagan, is in his Tartarus.

Milton has spoken of the “milder shades of Purgatory;” and truly they possess great beauties.  Even in a theological point of view they are something like a bit of Christian refreshment after the horrors of the Inferno.  The first emerging from the hideous gulf to the sight of the blue serenity of heaven, is painted in a manner inexpressibly charming.  So is the sea-shore with the coming of the angel; the valley, with the angels in green; the repose at night on the rocks; and twenty other pictures of gentleness and love.  And yet, special and great has been the escape of the Protestant world from this part of Roman Catholic belief; for Purgatory is the heaviest stone that hangs about the neck of the old and feeble in that communion.  Hell is avoidable by repentance; but Purgatory, what modest conscience shall escape?  Mr. Cary, in a note on a passage in which Dante recommends his readers to think on what follows this expiatory state, rather than what is suffered there,[23] looks upon the poet’s injunction as an “unanswerable objection to the doctrine of purgatory,” it being difficult to conceive “how the best can meet death without horror, if they believe it must be followed by immediate and intense suffering.”  Luckily, assent is not belief; and mankind’s feelings are for the most part superior to their opinions; otherwise the world would have been in a bad way indeed, and nature not been vindicated of her children.  But let us watch and be on our guard against all resuscitations of superstition.

As to our Florentine’s Heaven, it is full of beauties also, though sometimes of a more questionable and pantomimical sort than is to be found in either of the other books.  I shall speak of some of them presently; but the general impression of the place is, that it is no heaven at all.  He says it is, and talks much of its smiles and its beatitude; but always excepting the poetry—­especially the similes brought from the more heavenly earth—­we realise little but a fantastical assemblage of doctors