So much for his beloved countrymen.  As for foreigners, particularly kings, “Edward the First of England, and Robert of Scotland, were a couple of grasping fools; the Emperor Albert was an usurper; Alphonso the Second, of Spain, a debauchee; the King of Bohemia a coward; Frederick of Arragon a coward and miser; the Kings of Portugal and Norway forgers; the King of Naples a man whose virtues were expressed by a unit, and his vices by a million; and the King of France, the descendant of a Paris butcher, and of progenitors who poisoned St. Thomas Aquinas, their descendants conquering with the arms of Judas rather than of soldiers, and selling the flesh of their daughters to old men, in order to extricate themselves from a danger.” [31]

When we add to these invectives, damnations of friends as well as foes, of companions, lawyers, men of letters, princes, philosophers, popes, pagans, innocent people as well as guilty, fools and wise, capable and incapable, men, women, and children,—­it is really no better than a kind of diabolical sublimation of Lord Thurlow’s anathemas in the Rolliad, which begins with

  “Damnation seize ye all;”

and ends with

  “Damn them beyond what mortal tongue can tell,
  Confound, sink, plunge them all to deepest blackest hell.” [32]

In the gross, indeed, this is ridiculous enough.

No burlesque can beat it.  But in the particular, one is astonished and saddened at the cruelties in which the poet allows his imagination to riot horrors generally described with too intense a verisimilitude not to excite our admiration, with too astounding a perseverance not to amaze our humanity, and sometimes with an amount of positive joy and delight that makes us ready to shut the book with disgust and indignation.  Thus, in a circle in hell, where traitors are stuck up to their chins in ice (canto xxxii.), the visitor, in walking about, happens to give one of their faces a kick; the sufferer weeps, and then curses him—­with such infernal truth does the writer combine the malignant with the pathetic!  Dante replies to the curse by asking the man his name.  He is refused it.  He then seizes the miserable wretch by the hair, in order to force him to the disclosure; and Virgil is represented as commending the barbarity![33] But he does worse.  To barbarity he adds treachery of his own.  He tells another poor wretch, whose face is iced up with his tears, as if he had worn a crystal vizor, that if he will disclose his name and offence, he will relieve his eyes awhile, that he may weep.  The man does so; and the ferocious poet then refuses to perform his promise, adding mockery to falsehood, and observing that ill manners are the only courtesy proper to wards such a fellow![34] It has been conjectured, that Macchiavelli apparently encouraged the enormities of the princes of his time, with a design to expose them to indignation.  It might have been thought of Dante, if he had not