The spirit of the blasphemous witticism attributed to another Italian, viz. that the reason why God prohibited revenge to mankind was its being “too delicate a morsel for any but himself,” is here gravely anticipated as a positive compliment to God by the fierce poet of the thirteenth century, who has been held up as a great Christian divine!  God hugs revenge to his bosom with delight!  The Supreme Being confounded with a poor grinning Florentine!]

[Footnote 39:  A ludicrous anti-climax this to modern ears!  The allusion is to the Pygmalion who was Dido’s brother, and who murdered her husband, the priest Sichaeus, for his riches.  The term “parricide” is here applied in its secondary sense of—­the murderer of any one to whom we owe reverence.]

[Footnote 40:  Heliodorus was a plunderer of the Temple, thus supernaturally punished.  The subject has been nobly treated by Raphael.]

[Footnote 41:  A grand and beautiful fiction.]

[Footnote 42:  Readers need hardly be told that there is no foundation for this fancy, except in the invention of the churchmen.  Dante, in another passage, not necessary to give, confounds the poet Statius who was from Naples, with a rhetorician of the same name from Thoulouse.]

[Footnote 43: 

  “Paren l’occhiaje anella senza gemme.”

This beautiful and affecting image is followed in the original by one of the most fantastical conceits of the time.  The poet says, that the physiognomist who “reads the word OMO (homo, man), written in the face of the human being, might easily have seen the letter m in theirs.”

  “Chi nel viso de gli uomini legge o m o,
  Bene avria quivi conosciuto l’emme.”

The meaning is, that the perpendicular lines of the nose and temples form the letter M, and the eyes the two O’s.  The enthusiast for Roman domination must have been delighted to find that Nature wrote in Latin!]

[Footnote 44: 

  “Se le svergognate fosser certe
  Di quel che l’ ciel veloce loro ammanna,
  Gia per urlare avrian le bocche aperte.”

This will remind the reader of the style of that gentle Christian, John Knox, who, instead of offering his own “cheek to the smiters,” delighted to smite the cheeks of women.  Fury was his mode of preaching meekness, and threats of everlasting howling his reproof of a tune on Sundays.  But, it will be said, he looked to consequences.  Yes; and produced the worst himself, both spiritual and temporal.  Let the whisky-shops answer him.  However, he helped to save Scotland from Purgatory:  so we must take good and bad together, and hope the best in the end.

Forese, like many of Dante’s preachers, seems to have been one of those self-ignorant or self-exasperated denouncers, who “Compound for sins they are inclined to, By damning those they have no mind to.”  He was a glutton, who could not bear to see ladies too little clothed.  The defacing of “God’s image” in his own person he considered nothing.]