“Enough,” said Virgil; “I trouble thee no more.”  The soul of Guido di Montefeltro, overhearing the great Mantuan speak in a Lombard dialect, asked him news of the state of things in Romagna; and then told him how he had lost his chance of paradise, by thinking Pope Boniface could at once absolve him from his sins, and use them for his purposes.[34] He was going to heaven, he said, by the help of St. Francis, who came on purpose to fetch him, when a black angel met them, and demanded his absolved, indeed, but unrepented victim.  “To repent evil, and to will to do it, at one and the same time, are,” said the dreadful angel, “impossible:  therefore wrong me not.”

“Oh, how I shook,” said the unhappy Guido, “when he laid his hands upon me!” And with these words the flame writhed and beat itself about for agony, and so took its way.

The pilgrims crossed over to the banks of the ninth gulf, where the Sowers of Scandal, the Schismatics, Heretics, and Founders of False Religions, underwent the penalties of such as load themselves with the sins of those whom they seduce.

The first sight they beheld was Mahomet, tearing open his own bowels, and calling out to them to mark him.  Before him walked his son-in-law, Ali, weeping, and cloven to the chin; and the divisions in the church were punished in like manner upon all the schismatics in the place.  They all walked round the circle, their gashes closing as they went; and on their reaching a certain point, a fiend hewed them open again with a sword.  The Arabian prophet, ere he passed on, bade the pilgrims warn Friar Dolcino how he suffered himself to be surprised in his mountain-hold by the starvations of winter-time, if he did not wish speedily to follow him.[35]

Among other mangled wretches, they beheld Piero of Medicina, a sower of dissension, exhibiting to them his face and throat all over wounds; and Curio, compelled to shew his tongue cut out for advising Caesar to cross the Rubicon; and Mosca de’ Lamberti, an adviser of assassination, and one of the authors of the Guelf and Ghibelline miseries, holding up the bleeding stumps of his arms, which dripped on his face.  “Remember Mosca,” cried he; “remember him, alas! who said, ’A deed done is a thing ended.’  A bad saying of mine was that for the Tuscan nation.”

“And death to thy family,” cried Dante.

The assassin hurried away like a man driven mad with grief upon grief; and Dante now beheld a sight, which, if it were not, he says, for the testimony of a good conscience—­that best of friends, which gives a man assurance of himself under the breastplate of a spotless innocence[36]—­he should be afraid to relate without further proof.  He saw—­and while he was writing the account of it he still appeared to see—­a headless trunk about to come past him with the others.  It held its severed head by the hair, like a lantern; and the head looked up at the two pilgrims, and said, “Woe is me!”