of great men.  Oh! had the first indoctrinators of Christian feeling, while enlisting the “divine Plato” into the service of diviner charity, only kept the latter just enough in mind to discern the beautiful difference between the philosopher’s unmalignant and improvable evil, and their own malignant and eternal one, what a world of folly and misery they might have saved us!  But as the evil has happened, let us hope that even this form of it has had its uses.  If Dante thought it salutary to the world to maintain a system of religious terror, the same charity which can hope that it may once have been so, has taught us how to commence a better.  But did he, after all, or did he not, think it salutary?  Did he think so, believing the creed himself? or did he think it from an unwilling sense of its necessity?  Or, lastly, did he write only as a mythologist, and care for nothing but the exercise of his spleen and genius?  If he had no other object than that, his conscientiousness would be reduced to a low pitch indeed.  Foscolo is of opinion he was not only in earnest, but that he was very near taking himself for an apostle, and would have done so had his prophecies succeeded, perhaps with success to the pretension.[24] Thank heaven, his “Hell” has not embittered the mild reading-desks of the Church of England.

If King George the Third himself, with all his arbitrary notions, and willing religious acquiescence, could not endure the creed of St. Athanasius with its damnatory enjoinments of the impossible, what would have been said to the inscription over Dante’s hell-gate, or the account of Ugolino eating an archbishop, in the gentle chapels of Queen Victoria?  May those chapels have every beauty in them, and every air of heaven, that painting and music can bestow—­divine gifts, not unworthy to be set before their Divine Bestower; but far from them be kept the foul fiends of inhumanity and superstition!

It is certainly impossible to get at a thorough knowledge of the opinions of Dante even in theology; and his morals, if judged according to the received standard, are not seldom puzzling.  He rarely thinks as the popes do; sometimes not as the Church does:  he is lax, for instance, on the subject of absolution by the priest at death.[25] All you can be sure of is, the predominance of his will, the most wonderful poetry, and the notions he entertained of the degrees of vice and virtue.  Towards the errors of love he is inclined to be so lenient (some think because he had indulged in them himself), that it is pretty clear he would not have put Paulo and Francesca into hell, if their story had not been too recent, and their death too sudden, to allow him to assume their repentance in the teeth of the evidence required.  He avails himself of orthodox license to put “the harlot Rahab” into heaven ("cette bonne fille de Jericho,” as Ginguene calls her); nay, he puts her into the planet Venus, as if to compliment her on her profession; and one of her companions there