In the year 1309 the first part of the “Divine Comedy,” the Inferno, was finished by Dante, at the age of forty-four, in the tenth year of his pilgrimage, under the roof of the Marquis of Lunigiana; and it was intrusted to the care of Fra Ilario, a monk living on the beautiful Ligurian shores.  As everybody knows, it is a vivid, graphic picture of what was supposed to be the infernal regions, where great sinners are punished with various torments forever and ever.  It is interesting for the excellence of the poetry, the brilliant analyses of characters, the allusion to historical events, the bitter invectives, the intense sarcasms, and the serious, earnest spirit which underlies the descriptions.  But there is very little of gentleness or compassion, in view of the protracted torments of the sufferers.  We stand aghast in view of the miseries and monsters, furies and gorgons, snakes and fires, demons, filth, lakes of pitch, pools of blood, plains of scorching sands, circles, and chimeras dire,—­a physical hell of utter and unspeakable dreariness and despair, awfully and powerfully described, but still repulsive.  In each of the dismal abodes, far down in the bowels of the earth, which Dante is supposed to have visited with Virgil as a guide, in which some infernal deity presides, all sorts of physical tortures are accumulated, inflicted on traitors, murderers, robbers,—­men who have committed great crimes, unpunished in their lifetime; such men as Cain, Judas, Ugolino,—­men consigned to an infamous immortality.  On the great culprits of history, and of Italy especially, Dante virtually sits in judgment; and he consigns them equally to various torments which we shudder to think of.

And here let me say, as a general criticism, that in the Inferno are brought out in tremendous language the opinions of the Middle Ages in reference to retribution.  Dante does not rise above them, with all his genius; he is not emancipated from them.  It is the rarest thing in this world for any man, however profound his intellect and bold his spirit, to be emancipated from the great and leading ideas of his age.  Abraham was, and Moses, and the founder of Buddhism, and Socrates, and Mohammed, and Luther; but they were reformers, more or less divinely commissioned, with supernatural aid in many instances to give them wisdom.  But Homer was not, nor Euripides, nor the great scholastics of the Middle Ages, nor even popes.  The venerated doctors and philosophers, prelates, scholars, nobles, kings, to say nothing of the people, thought as Dante did in reference to future punishment,—­that it was physical, awful, accumulative, infinite, endless; the wrath of avenging deity displayed in pains and agonies inflicted on the body, like the tortures of inquisitors, thus appealing to the fears of men, on which chiefly the power of the clergy was based.  Nor in these views of endless physical sufferings, as if the body itself were eternal and indestructible,