is a fair Ghibelline, sister of the tyrant Ezzelino, a lady famous for her gallantries, of whom the poet good-naturedly says, that she “was overcome by her star”—­to wit, the said planet Venus; and yet he makes her the organ of the most unfeminine triumphs over the Guelphs.  But both these ladies, it is to be understood, repented—­for they had time for repentance; their good fortune saved them.  Poor murdered Francesca had no time to repent; therefore her mischance was her damnation!  Such are the compliments theology pays to the Creator.  In fact, nothing is really punished in Dante’s Catholic hell but impenitence, deliberate or accidental.  No delay of repentance, however dangerous, hinders the most hard-hearted villain from reaching his heaven.  The best man goes to hell for ever, if he does not think he has sinned as Dante thinks; the worst is beatified, if he agrees with him:  the only thing which every body is sure of, is some dreadful duration of agony in purgatory—­the great horror of Catholic death beds.  Protestantism may well hug itself on having escaped it.  O Luther! vast was the good you did us.  O gentle Church of England! let nothing persuade you that it is better to preach frightful and foolish ideas of God from your pulpits, than loving-kindness to all men, and peace above all things.

If Dante had erred only on the side of indulgence, humanity could easily have forgiven him—­for the excesses of charity are the extensions of hope; but, unfortunately, where he is sweet-natured once, he is bitter a hundred times.  This is the impression he makes on universalists of all creeds and parties; that is to say, on men who having run the whole round of sympathy with their fellow-creatures, become the only final judges of sovereign pretension.  It is very well for individuals to make a god of Dante for some encouragement of their own position or pretension; but a god for the world at large he never was, or can be; and I doubt if an impression to this effect was not always, from the very dawn of our literature, the one entertained of him by the genius of our native country, which could never long endure any kind of unwarrantable dictation.  Chaucer evidently thought him a man who would spare no unnecessary probe to the feelings (see the close of his version of Ugolino).  Spenser says not a word of him, though he copied Tasso, and eulogised Ariosto.  Shakspeare would assuredly have put him into the list of those presumptuous lookers into eternity who “take upon themselves to know” (Cymbeline, act v. sc. 4).  Milton, in his sonnet to Henry Lawes, calls him “that sad Florentine”—­a lamenting epithet, by which we do not designate a man whom we desire to resemble.  The historian of English poetry, admirably applying to him a passage out of Milton, says that “Hell grows darker at his frown.” [26]

Walter Scott could not read him, at least not with pleasure.  He tells Miss Seward that the “plan” of the poem appeared to him “unhappy; the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting.” [27] Uninteresting, I think, it is impossible to consider it.  The known world is there, and the unknown pretends to be there; and both are surely interesting to most people.