And damn you to the worst of DANTE'S hells.

your terrors are better than Dante's; for they warn, as far as warning can do good, and they neither afflict humanity nor degrade God.

As to the question which of the two is the greater production, it is like asking which is the greater, Dante's "Commedia" or Shakspeare's "Macbeth"?

This is the essence of Dante's sentiment (it is painful to think that he applies it very cruelly) "E cortesia fù, lui esser villano" and it is undeniable that a too intense consciousness of one's kinship with all frailties and vices undermines the active heroism which battles against wrong.

CHAPTER II The Duomo II: Its Associations Dante's pictureSir John HawkwoodAncestor and DescendantThe Pazzi ConspiracySqueamish MonteseccoGiuliano de' Medici diesLorenzo's escapeVengeance on the PazziBotticelli's cartoonHigh MassLuca della RobbiaMichelangelo nearing the endThe Miracles of ZenobiusEast and West meet in splendourMarsilio Ficino and the New LearningBeautiful glass.

The feuds between these divisions took the place of those between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, since Florence was never happy without internal strife, and it cannot have added to Dante's home comfort that his wife was related to Corso Donati, who led the Neri and swaggered in his bullying way about the city with proprietary, intolerant airs that must have been infuriating to a man with Dante's stern sense of right and justice.

Had Dante's pride and indignation always vented themselves in this truly exalted manner, never could the admirers of his genius have refused him their sympathy; and never, I conceive, need he either have brought his exile upon him, or closed it as he did.

Dante's modesty has been asserted on the ground of his humbling himself to the fame of Virgil, and at the feet of blessed spirits; but this kind of exalted humility does not repay a man's fellow-citizens for lording it over them with scorn and derision.

From this the hero and his mistress ascend by a flight, exquisitely conceived, to the stars; where the sun and the planets of the Ptolemaic system (for the true one was unknown in Dante's time) form a series of heavens for different virtues, the whole terminating in the empyrean, or region of pure light, and the presence of the Beatific Vision.

Most happily is the distinction here intimated between the undesirableness of Dante's book in a moral and religious point of view, and the greater desirableness of it, nevertheless, as a pattern of poetry; for absurdity, however potent, wears itself out in the end, and leaves what is good and beautiful to vindicate even so foul an origin.

Indeed, if pathos and the most impressive simplicity, and graceful beauty of all kinds, and abundant grandeur, can pay (as the reader, I believe, will think it does even in a prose abstract), for the pangs of moral discord and absurdity inflicted by the perusal of Dante's poem, it may challenge competition with any in point of interest.

An angel now, as before, took the fifth letter from Dante's forehead; and the three poets having ascended into the sixth round of the mountain, were journeying on lovingly together, Dante listening with reverence to the talk of the two ancients, when they came up to a sweet-smelling fruit-tree, upon which a clear stream came tumbling from a rock beside it, and diffusing itself through the branches.

PAOLO AND FRANCESCA It happened in that great Italian land Where every bosom heateth with a star At Rimini, anigh that crumbling strand The Adriatic filcheth near and far In that same past where Dante's dream-days are, That one Francesca gave her youthful gold Unto an aged carle to bolt and bar; Though all the love which great young hearts can hold, How could she give that love unto a miser old? Nay!

of the "Inferno," Benvenuto says, speaking of Dante's great enemy, Boniface VIII.,"Auctor ssepissime dicit de ipso Bonifacio magna mala, qui de rei veritate fuit magnanimus peccator": "Our author very often speaks exceedingly ill of Boniface, who was in very truth a grand sinner."

Now I know you can't explain this last word to me, for I would wager a large sum that you never tasted of Dante's Banquetno, not so much as the smallest crumb from it; and therefore how should you know what he means by the anagorical sense?

The moon shone full on the water, and it looked more wan and wild than an illustration out of Dante's Inferno.

But Italy, reviving from the trance Of Vandal, Goth, and Monkish ignorance, With pauses, cadence, and well-vowell'd words, And all the graces a good ear affords, Made rhyme an art, and Dante's polish'd page Restored a silver, not a golden age.

" This introduction, short as it is, exhibits a characteristic trait of Dante's mind, in the declaration of his intention to copy from the book of his memory, or, in other words, to write the true records of experience.

Paris with its electric lights is brilliant everywhere, while London, with its meager gas jets here and there struggling with the darkness, is as gloomy and desolate as Dore's pictures of Dante's Inferno.

But suppose Dante's dear family had suppressed the Vita Nuova.

Then there was Dante's love for Beatrice, which caused him to sit down and write such a lot.

Homer, too, has been found out to be a myth; and we know not if even Dante's originality has altogether passed unquestioned in this age of disbelief and downpulling; although what brow, save that thunder-scathed pile, could wear those scorched laurels, and who but the "man who had been in hell" could have written the "Inferno?"

MARTIN, SIR THEODORE, man of letters, born in Edinburgh; acquired his first fame under the pseudonym of Bon Gaultier; is author of the "Life of the late Prince Consort"; wrote along with Aytouna "Book of Ballads," and translated the Odes of Horace, Dante's "Vita Nuova" and Goethe's "Faust"; b. 1816.

Once in that belfry, and truly might the sense of Dante's famous inscription become my motto for life: "Here hope is left behind.

He compares the evils of his own day with the splendours of the past, and asks whether the accident of birth is the real source of nobility; a man must be judged by himself and his acts and not by the rank of his forefathers; these were the sentiments that gained him a mention in the Fourth Book of Dante's Convivio.