Landor, in his delightful book the Pentameron—­a book full of the profoundest as well as sweetest humanity—­makes Petrarch follow up Boccaccio’s eulogies of the episode of Paulo and Francesca with ebullitions of surprise and horror: 

“Petrarca.  Perfection of poetry!  The greater is my wonder at discovering nothing else of the same order or cast in this whole section of the poem.  He who fainted at the recital of Francesca,

  ‘And he who fell as a dead body falls’

would exterminate all the inhabitants of every town in Italy!  What execrations against Florence, Pistoia, Pisa, Siena, Genoa! what hatred against the whole human race! what exultation and merriment at eternal and immitigable sufferings!  Seeing this, I cannot but consider the Inferno as the most immoral and impious book that ever was written.  Yet, hopeless that our country shall ever see again such poetry, and certain that without it our future poets would be more feebly urged forward to excellence, I would have dissuaded Dante from cancelling it, if this had been his intention.” [28]

Most happily is the distinction here intimated between the undesirableness of Dante’s book in a moral and religious point of view, and the greater desirableness of it, nevertheless, as a pattern of poetry; for absurdity, however potent, wears itself out in the end, and leaves what is good and beautiful to vindicate even so foul an origin.

Again, Petrarch says, “What an object of sadness and of consternation, he who rises up from hell like a giant refreshed!

“Boccaccio.  Strange perversion!  A pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night, to guide no one.  Paradise had fewer wants for him to satisfy than hell had, all which he fed to repletion; but let us rather look to his poetry than his temper.”

See also what is said in that admirable book further on (p. 50), respecting the most impious and absurd passage in all Dante’s poem, the assumption about Divine Love in the inscription over hell-gate—­one of those monstrosities of conception which none ever had the effrontery to pretend to vindicate, except theologians who profess to be superior to the priests of Moloch, and who yet defy every feeling of decency and humanity for the purpose of explaining their own worldly, frightened, or hard-hearted submission to the mistakes of the most wretched understandings.  Ugo Foscolo, an excellent critic where his own temper and violence did not interfere, sees nothing but jealousy in Petrarch’s dislike of Dante, and nothing but Jesuitism in similar feelings entertained by such men as Tiraboschi.  But all gentle and considerate hearts must dislike the rage and bigotry in Dante, even were it true (as the Dantesque Foscolo thinks) that Italy will never be regenerated till one-half of it is baptised in the blood of the other![29] Such men, with all their acuteness, are incapable of seeing what can be effected by nobler and serener times,