Not much, I should think, with Dante, but a great deal with the blue
devils.


MR FLOSKY

It is very certain, and much to be rejoiced at, that our literature is
hag-ridden. Tea has shattered our nerves; late dinners make us slaves
of indigestion; the French Revolution has made us shrink from the name
of philosophy, and has destroyed, in the more refined part of the
community (of which number I am one), all enthusiasm for political
liberty. That part of the _reading public_ which shuns the solid
food of reason for the light diet of fiction, requires a perpetual
adhibition of _sauce piquante_ to the palate of its depraved
imagination. It lived upon ghosts, goblins, and skeletons (I and my
friend Mr Sackbut served up a few of the best), till even the devil
himself, though magnified to the size of Mount Athos, became too base,
common, and popular, for its surfeited appetite. The ghosts have
therefore been laid, and the devil has been cast into outer darkness,
and now the delight of our spirits is to dwell on all the vices and
blackest passions of our nature, tricked out in a masquerade dress of
heroism and disappointed benevolence; the whole secret of which lies
in forming combinations that contradict all our experience, and
affixing the purple shred of some particular virtue to that precise
character, in which we should be most certain not to find it in the
living world; and making this single virtue not only redeem all the
real and manifest vices of the character, but make them actually
pass for necessary adjuncts, and indispensable accompaniments and
characteristics of the said virtue.