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lence, in a wealthy and highly civilized age, of worldly or selfish ideas; the common approximation of characters by perpetual intercourse, as of coins, by continual rubbing in passing from man to man, have taken away all freshness and originality from ideas. The learned, the polished, the highly educated, can hardly escape the fetters which former greatness throws over the soul. Milton could not avoid them half the images in his poems are taken from Homer, Virgil, and Dante; and who dare hope for emancipation when Milton was enthralled? The mechanical arts increase in perfection as society advances. Science ever takes its renewed flights from the platform which former efforts have erected. Industry, guided by experience, in successive ages, brings to the highest point all the contrivances and inventions which minister to the comfort or elegances of life. But it is otherwise with genius. It sinks in the progress of society, as much as science and the arts rise. The country of Homer and Æschylus sank for a thousand years into the torpor of the Byzantine empire. Originality perishes amidst acquisition. Freshness of conception is its life: like the flame, it burns fierce and clear in the first gales of a pure atmosphere; but languishes and dies in that polluted by many breaths.

It was the resurrection of the human mind, after the seclusion and solitary reflection of the middle ages, which gave this vein of original ideas to Dante, as their first wakening had given to Homer. Thought was not extinct; the human mind was not dormant during the dark ages; far from it-it never, in some respects, was more active. It was the first collision of their deep and lonely meditations with the works of the great ancient poets, which occasioned the prodigy. Universally it will be found to be the same. After the first flights of genius have been taken, it is by the collision of subsequent thought with it that the divine spark is again elicited. The meeting of two great minds is necessary to beget fresh ideas, as that of two clouds is to bring forth lightning, or the collision of flint and steel to produce fire. Johnson said he could not get new

ideas till he had read. He was right; though it is not one in a thousand who strikes out original thoughts from studying the works of others. The great sage did not read to imbibe the opinions of others, but to engender new ones for himself; he did not study to imitate, but to create. It was the same with Dante; it is the same with every really great man. His was the first powerful and original mind which, fraught with the profound and gloomy ideas nourished in seclusion during the middle ages, came into contact with the brilliant imagery, touching pathos, and harmonious language of the ancients. Hence his astonishing greatness. He almost worshipped Virgil, he speaks of him as a species of god; he mentions Homer as the first of poets. But he did not copy either the one or the other; he scarcely imitated them. He strove to rival their brevity and beauty of expression; but he did sq in giving vent to new ideas, in painting new images, in awakening new emotions. Inferno is as original as the Iliad; incomparably more SO than the Eneid. The offspring of originality with originality is a new and noble creation; of originality with mediocrity, a spurious and degraded imitation.

The

Dante paints the spirits of all the generations of men, each in their circle undergoing their allotted punishment; expiating by suffering the sins of an upper world. Virgil gave a glimpse, as it were, into that scene of retribution; Minos and Rhadamanthus passing judgment on the successive spirits brought before them; the flames of Tartarus, the rock of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, the vulture gnawing Prometheus. But with Homer and Virgil, the descent into the infernal regions was a brief episode; with Dante it was the whole poem. Immense was the effort of imagination requisite to give variety to such a subject, to prevent the mind from experiencing weariness amidst the eternal recur rence of crime and punishment. But the genius of Dante was equal to the task. His fancy was prodigious; his invention boundless; his imagination inexhaustible. Fenced in, as he was,

within narrow and gloomy limits by the nature of his subject, his creative spirit equals that of Homer himself. He has given birth to as many new ideas in the Inferno and the Paradiso, as the Grecian bard in the Iliad and Odyssey.

Though he had reflected so much and so deeply on the human heart, and was so perfect a master of all the anatomy of mental suffering, Dante's mind was essentially descriptive. He was a great painter as well as a profound thinker; he clothed deep feeling in the garb of the senses; he conceived a vast brood of new ideas, he arrayed them in a surprising manner in flesh and blood. He is ever clear and definite, at least in the Inferno. He exhibits in every canto of that wonderful poem a fresh image, but it is a clear one, of horror or anguish, which leaves nothing to the imagination to add or conceive. His ideal characters are real persons; they are present to our senses; we feel their flesh, see the quivering of their limbs, hear their lamentations, and feel a thrill of joy at their felicity. In the Paradiso he is more vague and general, and thence its acknowledged inferiority to the Inferno. But the images of horror are much more powerful than those of happiness, and it is they which have entranced the world. "It is easier," says Madame de Staël, "to convey ideas of suffering than those of happiness; for the former are too well

known to every heart, the latter only to a few."

The melancholy tone which pervades Dante's writings was doubtless, in a great measure, owing to the misfortunes of his life; and to them we are also indebted for many of the most caustic and powerful of his versesperhaps for the design of the Inferno itself. He took vengeance on the generation which had persecuted and exiled him, by exhibiting its leaders suffering in the torments of hell. In his long seclusion, chiefly in the monastery of Santa Croce di Fonte Avellana, a wild and solitary retreat in the territory of Gubbio, and in a tower belonging to the Conte Falcucci, in the same district, his immortal work was written. The mortifications he underwent during this long and dismal exile are thus described by himself:-"Wandering over almost every part in which our language extends, I have gone about like a mendicant; showing against my will the wound with which fortune has smitten me, and which is often falsely imputed to the demerit of him by whom it is endured. I have been, indeed, a vessel without sail or steerage, carried about to divers ports, and roads, and shores, by the dry wind that springs out of sad poverty."

In the third circle of hell, Dante sees those who are punished by the plague of burning sand falling perpetually on them. Their torments are thus described

"Supin giaceva in terra alcuna gente;
Alcuna si sedea tutta raccolta;
Ed altra andava continuamente.

Quella che giva intorno era più molta;
E quella men che giaceva al tormento;
Ma più al duolo avea la lingua sciolta.
Sovra tutto 'l sabbion d'un cader lento
Piovean di fuoco dilatate falde,
Come di neve in alpe senza vento.

Quali Alessandro in quelle parti calde
D' India vide sovra lo suo stuolo
Fiamme cadere infino a terra salde."

Inferno, c. xiv.

"Of naked spirits many a flock I saw,
All weeping piteously, to different laws
Subjected for on earth some lay supine,
Some crouching close were seated, others paced
Incessantly around; the latter tribe

More numerous, those fewer who beneath
The torment lay, but louder in their grief.

O'er all the sand fell slowly wafting down

Dilated flakes of fire, as flakes of snow
On Alpine summit, when the wind is hush'd.
As, in the torrid Indian clime, the son
Of Ammon saw, upon his warrior band
Descending, solid flames, that to the ground
Came down."

CARY'S Dante, c. xiv.

The first appearance of Malebolge is described in these striking lines

This is the ment in hell. the first :

"Luogo è in Inferno, detto Malebolge,
Tutto di pietra e di color ferrigno,
Come la cerchia che d'intorno il volge.
Nel dritto mezzo del campo maligno
Vaneggia un pozzo assai largo e profondo,
Di cui suo luogo conterà l' ordigno.

Quel cinghio che rimane adunque è tondo
Tra 'l pozzo e 'l piè dell' alta ripa dura,
E ha distinto in dieci valli al fondo."

Inferno, c. xviii.

"There is a place within the depths of hell
Call'd Malebolge, all of rock dark-stain'd
With hue ferruginous, e'en as the steep

That round it circling winds. Right in the midst
Of that abominable region yawns

A spacious gulf profound, whereof the frame
Due time shall tell. The circle, that remains,
Throughout its round, between the gulf and base
Of the high craggy banks, successive forms
Ten bastions, in its hollow bottom raised."

CARY'S Dante, c. xviii.

outward appearance of Malebolge, the worst place of punishIt had many frightful abysses; what follows is the picture of

"Ristemmo per veder l'altra fessura Di Malebolge e gli altri pianti vani :

E vidila mirabilmente oscura.

Quale nell' arzana de' Veneziani
Bolle l'inverno la tenace pece,
A rimpalmar li legni lor non sani—

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Tal non per fuoco ma per divina arte,
Bollia laggiuso una pegola spessa,

Che 'nviscava la ripa d'ogni parte.
I' vedea lei, ma non vedeva in essa
Ma che le bolle che 'l bollor levava,
E gonfiar tutta e riseder compressa.

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E vidi dietro a noi un diavol nero
Correndo su per lo scoglio venire.

Ahi quant' egli era nell' aspetto fiero!
E quanto mi parea nell' atto acerbo,
Con l' ali aperte e sovre i piè leggiero !

L'omero suo ch' era acuto e superbo
Carcava un peccator con ambo l'anche,
Ed ei tenea de' piè ghermito il nerbo.

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Laggiù il buttò e per lo scoglio duro
Si volse, e mai non fu mastino sciolto
Con tanta fretta a seguitar lo furo.

Quei s'attuffò e tornò su convolto ;
Ma i demon che del ponte avean coverchio
Gridar: qui non ha luogo il Santo Volto.

Qui si nuota altramenti che nel Serchio:

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Him dashing down, o'er the rough rock he turn'd;
Nor ever after thief a mastiff loosed

Sped with like eager haste. That other sank,
And forthwith writhing to the surface rose.
But those dark demons, shrouded by the bridge,
Cried-Here the hallow'd visage saves not: here
Is other swimming than in Serchio's wave,
Wherefore, if thou desire we rend thee not,
Take heed thou mount not o'er the pitch. This said,
They grappled him with more than hundred hooks,
And shouted-Cover'd thou must sport thee here;
So, if thou canst, in secret mayst thou filch."

Fraught as his imagination was with gloomy ideas, with images of horror, it is the fidelity of his descriptions, the minute reality of his pictures, which gives them their terrible power. He knew well what it is that penetrates the soul. His images of horror in the infernal regions were all founded on those familiar to every one in the upper world; it was from the caldron of boiling pitch in the arsenal of Venice that he took his idea of one of the pits of Malebolge. But what a picture does he there exhibit! The writhing sinner plunged headlong into the boiling waves, rising to the surface, and a hundred demons, mocking his suffer

CARY'S Dante, c. xxi.

ings, and with outstretched hooks tearing his flesh till he dived again beneath the liquid fire! It is the reality of the scene, the images familiar yet magnified in horror, which constitutes its power: we stand by; our flesh creeps as it would at witnessing an auto-da-fè of Castile, or on beholding a victim perishing under the knout in Russia.

Michael Angelo was, in one sense, the painter of the Old Testament, as his bold and aspiring genius arrived rather at delineating the events of warfare, passion, or suffering, chronicled in the records of the Jews, than the scenes of love, affection, and benevolence, depicted in the gospels.

But his mind was not formed merely on the events recorded in antiquity: it is no world doubtful of the immortality of the soul which he depicts. He is rather the personification in painting of the soul of Dante. His imagination was evidently fraught with the conceptions of the Inferno. The expression of mind beams forth in all his works. Vehement passion, stern resolve, undaunted valour, sainted devotion, infant innocence, alternately occupied his pencil. It is hard to say in which he was greatest. In all his works we see marks of the genius of antiquity meeting the might of modern times: the imagery of mythology blended with the aspirations of Christianity. We see it in the dome of St Peter's, we see it in the statue of Moses. Grecian sculpture was the realization in form of the conceptions of Homer; Italian painting the representation on canvass of the revelations of the gospel, which Dante clothed in the garb of poetry. Future ages should ever strive to equal, but can never hope to excel them.

Never did artist work with more persevering vigour than Michael Angelo. He himself said that he laboured harder for fame, than ever poor artist did for bread. Born of a noble family, the heir to considerable possessions, he took to the arts from his earliest years from enthusiastic passion and conscious power. During a long life of ninety years, he prosecuted them with the ardent zeal of youth. He was consumed by the thirst for fame, the desire of great achievements, the invariable mark of heroic minds; and which, as it is altogether beyond the reach of the great bulk of mankind, so is the feeling of all others which to them is most incomprehensible. Nor was that noble enthusiasm without its reward. It was his extraordinary good fortune to be called to form, at the same time, the Last Judgment on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, the glorious dome of St Peter's, and the group of Notre Dame de Pitié, which now adorns the

der the roof

chapel of the Cruc of that august edi... The "Holy Family" in the Palazzo Pitti at Florence, and the "Three Fates" in the same collection, give an idea of his powers in oil-painting: thus he carried to the highest perfection, at the same time, the rival arts of architecture, sculpture, fresco and oil painting.* He may truly be called the founder of Italian painting, as Homer was of the ancient epic, and Dante of the great style in modern poetry. None but a colossal mind could have done such things. Raphael took lessons from him in painting, and professed through life the most unbounded respect for his great preceptor. None have attempted to approach him in architecture; the cupola of St Peter's stands alone in the world.

But notwithstanding all this, Michael Angelo had some defects. He created the great style in painting, a style which has made modern Italy as immortal as the arms of the legions did the ancient. But the very grandeur of his conceptions, the vigour of his drawing, his incomparable command of bone and muscle, his lofty expression and impassioned mind, made him neglect, and perhaps despise, the lesser details of his art. Ardent in the pursuit of expression, he often overlooked_execution. When he painted the Last Judgment or the Fall of the Titans in fresco, on the ceiling and walls of the Sistine Chapel, he was incomparable; but that gigantic style was unsuitable for lesser pictures or rooms of ordinary proportions. By the study of his masterpieces, subsequent painters have often been led astray; they have aimed at force of expression to the neglect of delicacy in execution. This defect is, in an especial manner, conspicuous in Sir Joshua Reynolds, who worshipped Michael Angelo with the most devoted fervour; and through him it has descended to Lawrence, and nearly the whole modern school of England. When we see Sir Joshua's noble glass window in Magdalen College, Ox

*The finest design ever conceived by Michael Angelo was a cartoon representing warriors bathing, and some buckling on their armour at the sound of the trumpet, which summoned them to their standards in the war between Pisa and Florence. It perished, however, in the troubles of the latter city; but an engraved copy remains of part, which justifies the eulogiums bestowed upon it.

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