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,