and the progress of civilisation.  They fancy, no doubt, that they are vindicating the energies of Nature herself, and the inevitable necessity of “doing evil that good may come.”  But Dante in so doing violated the Scripture he professed to revere; and men must not assume to themselves that final knowledge of results, which is the only warrant of the privilege, and the possession of which is to be arrogated by no earthly wisdom.  One calm discovery of science may do away with all the boasted eternal necessities of the angry and the self-idolatrous.  The passions that may be necessary to savages are not bound to remain so to civilised men, any more than the eating of man’s flesh or the worship of Jugghernaut.  When we think of the wonderful things lately done by science for the intercourse of the world, and the beautiful and tranquil books of philosophy written by men of equal energy and benevolence, and opening the peacefulest hopes for mankind, and views of creation to which Dante’s universe was a nutshell,—­such a vision as that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no better than the dream of an hypochondriacal savage, and his nutshell a rottenness to be spit out of the mouth.

Heaven send that the great poet’s want of charity has not made myself presumptuous and uncharitable!  But it is in the name of society I speak; and words, at all events, now-a-days are not the terrible, stake-preceding things they were in his.  Readers in general, however—­even those of the literary world—­have little conception of the extent to which Dante carries either his cruelty or his abuse.  The former (of which I shall give some examples presently) shews appalling habits of personal resentment; the latter is outrageous to a pitch of the ludicrous—­positively screaming.  I will give some specimens of it out of Foscolo himself, who collects them for a different purpose; though, with all his idolatry of Dante, he was far from being insensible to his mistakes.

“The people of Sienna,” according to this national and Christian poet, were “a parcel of cox-combs; those of Arezzo, dogs; and of Casentino, hogs.  Lucca made a trade of perjury.  Pistoia was a den of beasts, and ought to be reduced to ashes; and the river Arno should overflow and drown every soul in Pisa.  Almost all the women in Florence walked half-naked in public, and were abandoned in private.  Every brother, husband, son, and father, in Bologna, set their women to sale.  In all Lombardy were not to be found three men who were not rascals; and in Genoa and Romagna people went about pretending to be men, but in reality were bodies inhabited by devils, their souls having gone to the ’lowest pit of hell’ to join the betrayers of their friends and kinsmen.” [30]