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