and perpetuated in another world; no father’s misery so enforced upon us as Ugolino’s, who, for hundreds of years, has not grown tired of the revenge to which it wrought him.  Dante even puts this weight and continuity of feeling into passages of mere transient emotion or illustration, unconnected with the next world; as in the famous instance of the verses about evening, and many others which the reader will meet with in this volume.  Indeed, if pathos and the most impressive simplicity, and graceful beauty of all kinds, and abundant grandeur, can pay (as the reader, I believe, will think it does even in a prose abstract), for the pangs of moral discord and absurdity inflicted by the perusal of Dante’s poem, it may challenge competition with any in point of interest.  His Heaven, it is true, though containing both sublime and lovely passages, is not so good as his Earth.  The more unearthly he tried to make it, the less heavenly it became.  When he is content with earth in heaven itself,-when he literalises a metaphor, and with exquisite felicity finds himself arrived there in consequence of fixing his eyes on the eyes of Beatrice, then he is most celestial.  But his endeavours to express degrees of beatitude and holiness by varieties of flame and light,—­of dancing lights, revolving lights, lights of smiles, of stars, of starry crosses, of didactic letters and sentences, of animal figures made up of stars full of blessed souls, with saints forming an eagle’s beak and David in its eye!—­such superhuman attempts become for the most part tricks of theatrical machinery, on which we gaze with little curiosity and no respect.

His angels, however, are another matter.  Belief was prepared for those winged human forms, and they furnished him with some of his most beautiful combinations of the natural with the supernatural.  Ginguene has remarked the singular variety as well as beauty of Dante’s angels.  Milton’s, indeed, are commonplace in the comparison.  In the eighth canto of the Inferno, the devils insolently refuse the poet and his guide an entrance into the city of Dis:—­an angel comes sweeping over the Stygian lake to enforce it; the noise of his wings makes the shores tremble, and is like a crashing whirlwind such as beats down the trees and sends the peasants and their herds flying before it.  The heavenly messenger, after rebuking the devils, touches the portals of the city with his wand; they fly open; and he returns the way he came without uttering a word to the two companions.  His face was that of one occupied with other thoughts.  This angel is announced by a tempest.  Another, who brings the souls of the departed to Purgatory, is first discovered at a distance, gradually disclosing white splendours, which are his wings and garments.  He comes in a boat, of which his wings are the sails; and as he approaches, it is impossible to look him in the face for its brightness.  Two other angels have green wings and green garments,