THE ITALIAN PILGRIM’S PROGRESS.

I.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL.

Argument.

The infernal regions, according to Dante, are situate in the globe we inhabit, directly beneath Jerusalem, and consist of a succession of gulfs or circles, narrowing as they descend, and terminating in the centre; so that the general shape is that of a funnel.  Commentators have differed as to their magnitude; but the latest calculation gives 315 miles for the diameter of the mouth or crater, and a quarter of a mile for that of its terminating point.  In the middle is the abyss, pervading the whole depth, and 245 miles in diameter at the opening; which reduces the different platforms, or territories that surround it, to a size comparatively small.  These territories are more or less varied with land and water, lakes, precipices, &c.  A precipice, fourteen miles high, divides the first of them from the second.  The passages from the upper world to the entrance are various; and the descents from one circle to another are effected by the poet and his guide in different manners-sometimes on foot through by-ways, sometimes by the conveyance of supernatural beings.  The crater he finds to be the abode of those who have done neither good nor evil, caring for nothing but themselves.  In the first circle are the whole unbaptised world—­heathens and infants—­melancholy, though not tormented.  Here also is found the Elysium of Virgil, whose Charon and other infernal beings are among the agents of torment.  In the second circle the torments commence with the sin of incontinence; and the punishment goes deepening with the crime from circle to circle, through gluttony, avarice, prodigality, wrath, sullenness, or unwillingness to be pleased with the creation, disbelief in God and the soul (with which the punishment by fire commences), usury, murder, suicide, blasphemy, seduction and other carnal enormities, adulation, simony, soothsaying, astrology, witchcraft, trafficking with the public interest, hypocrisy, highway robbery (on the great Italian scale), sacrilege, evil counsel, disturbance of the Church, heresy, false apostleship, alchemy, forgery, coining (all these, from seduction downwards, in one circle); then, in the frozen or lowest circle of all, treachery; and at the bottom of this is Satan, stuck into the centre of the earth.

With the centre of the globe commences the antipodean attraction of its opposite side, together with a rocky ascent out of it, through a huge ravine.  The poet and his guide, on their arrival at this spot, accordingly find their position reversed; and so conclude their downward journey upwards, till they issue forth to light on the borders of the sea which contains the island of Purgatory.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL.