taken a part in the cruelty, that he detailed the horrors of his hell out of a wish to disgust the world with its frightful notions of God.  This is certainly the effect of the worst part of his descriptions in an age like the present.  Black burning gulfs, full of outcries and blasphemy, feet red-hot with fire, men eternally eating their fellow-creatures, frozen wretches malignantly dashing their iced heads against one another, other adversaries mutually exchanging shapes by force of an attraction at once irresistible and loathing, and spitting with hate and disgust when it is done—­Enough, enough, for God’s sake!  Take the disgust out of one’s senses, O flower of true Christian wisdom and charity, now beginning to fill the air with fragrance!

But it will be said that Dante did all this out of his hate of cruelty itself, and of treachery itself.  Partly no doubt he did; and entirely he thought he did.  But see how the notions of such retribution react upon the judge, and produce in him the bad passions he punishes.  It is true the punishments are imaginary.  Were a human being actually to see such things, he must be dehumanised or he would cry out against them with horror and detestation.  But the poem draws them as truths; the writer’s creed threatened them; he himself contributed to maintain the belief; and however we may suppose such a belief to have had its use in giving alarm to ruffian passions and barbarously ignorant times, an age arrives when a beneficent Providence permits itself to be better understood, and dissipates the superfluous horror.

Many, indeed, of the absurdities of Dante’s poem are too obvious now-a-days to need remark.  Even the composition of the poem, egotistically said to be faultless by such critics as Alfieri, who thought they resembled him, partakes, as every body’s style does, of the faults as well as good qualities of the man.  It is nervous, concise, full almost as it can hold, picturesque, mighty, primeval; but it is often obscure, often harsh, and forced in its constructions, defective in melody, and wilful and superfluous in the rhyme.  Sometimes, also, the writer is inconsistent in circumstance (probably from not having corrected the poem); and he is not above being filthy.  Even in the episode of Paulo and Francesca, which has so often been pronounced faultless, and which is unquestionably one of the most beautiful pieces of writing in the world, some of these faults are observable, particularly in the obscurity of the passage about tolta forma, the cessation of the incessant tempest, and the non-adjuration of the two lovers in the manner that Virgil prescribes.