[Footnote 50:  This is the most tremendous lampoon, as far as I am aware, in the whole circle of literature.]

[Footnote 51:  “Cortesia fu lui esser villano.”  This is the foulest blot which Dante has cast on his own character in all his poem (short of the cruelties he thinks fit to attribute to God).  It is argued that he is cruel and false, out of hatred to cruelty and falsehood.  But why then add to the sum of both? and towards a man, too, supposed to be suffering eternally?  It is idle to discern in such barbarous inconsistencies any thing but the writer’s own contributions to the stock of them.  The utmost credit for right feeling is not to be given on every occasion to a man who refuses it to every one else.]

[Footnote 52:  “La creatura ch’ebbe il bel sembiante.”

This is touching; but the reader may as well be prepared for a total failure in Dante’s conception of Satan, especially the English reader, accustomed to the sublimity of Milton’s.  Granting that the Roman Catholic poet intended to honour the fallen angel with no sublimity, but to render him an object of mere hate and dread, he has overdone and degraded the picture into caricature.  A great stupid being, stuck up in ice, with three faces, one of which is yellow, and three mouths, each eating a sinner, one of those sinners being Brutus, is an object for derision; and the way in which he eats these, his everlasting bonnes-bouches, divides derision with disgust.  The passage must be given, otherwise the abstract of the poem would be incomplete; but I cannot help thinking it the worst anti-climax ever fallen into by a great poet.]

[Footnote 53:  This silence is, at all events, a compliment to Brutus, especially from a man like Dante, and the more because it is extorted.  Dante, no doubt, hated all treachery, particularly treachery to the leader of his beloved Roman emperors; forgetting three things; first, that Caesar was guilty of treachery himself to the Roman people; second, that he, Dante, has put Curio in hell for advising Caesar to cross the Rubicon, though he has put the crosser among the good Pagans; and third, that Brutus was educated in the belief that the punishment of such treachery as Caesar’s by assassination was one of the first of duties.  How differently has Shakspeare, himself an aristocratic rather than democratic poet, and full of just doubt of the motives of assassins in general, treated the error of the thoughtful, conscientious, Platonic philosopher!]

[Footnote 54:  At the close of this medley of genius, pathos, absurdity, sublimity, horror, and revoltingness, it is impossible for any reflecting heart to avoid asking, Cui bono? What is the good of it to the poor wretches, if we are to suppose it true? and what to the world—­except, indeed, as a poetic study and a warning against degrading notions of God—­if we are to take it simply as a fiction?  Theology, disdaining both questions, has an answer confessedly incomprehensible.  Humanity replies:  Assume not premises for which you have worse than no proofs.]