The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

stole a poisoned dagger wore.”

The Gabriel saying Ave is from Dante, Purgatory, X 40:⁠—

“One would have sworn that he was saying Ave.”

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Tartars nor Turks, “who are most perfect masters therein,” says Boccaccio, “as we can clearly see in Tartarian cloths, which truly are so skilfully woven, that no painter with his brush could equal, much less surpass them. The Tartars are⁠ ⁠…” And with this unfinished sentence close the Lectures upon Dante, begun by Giovanni Boccaccio on Sunday, August 9, 1373, in the church of San Stefano, in Florence. That there were some critics among his audience is apparent from this sonnet, which he addressed “to one who had censured his public Exposition of Dante.” See D. G. Rosetti, Early Italian Poets, p. 447:⁠—

“If Dante mourns, there wheresoe’er he be,
That such high fancies of a soul so proud
Should be laid open to the vulgar crowd,
(As, touching my Discourse, I ‘m told by thee,)
This were my grievous pain; and certainly
My proper blame should not be disavowed;
Though hereof somewhat, I declare aloud,
Were due to others, not alone to me.
False hopes, true poverty, and therewithal
The blinded judgment of a host of friends,
And their enteaties, made that I did thus.
But of all this there is no gain at all
Unto the thankless souls with whose base ends
Nothing agrees that’s great or generous.”

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Ovid, Metamorphoses VI:⁠—

“One at the loom so excellently skilled
That to the Goddess she refused to yield.”

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Their love of gold still haunting them in the other world. ↩

The arms of the Gianfigliacci of Florence. ↩

The arms of the Ubbriachi of Florence. ↩

The Scrovigni of Padua. ↩

Vitaliano del Dente of Padua. ↩

Giovanni Bujamonte, who seems to have had the ill-repute of being the greatest usurer of his day, called here in irony the “sovereign cavalier.” ↩

As the ass-driver did in the streets of Florence, when Dante beat him for singing his verses amiss. See Sacchetti, Nov. CXV ↩

Dante makes as short work with these usurers, as if he had been a curious traveller walking through the Ghetto of Rome, or the Judengasse of Frankfort. ↩

Ovid, Metamorphoses II, Addison’s Tr.:⁠—

“Half dead with sudden fear he dropt the reins;
The horses felt ’em loose upon their manes,
And, flying out through all the plains above,
Ran uncontrolled where’er their fury drove;
Rushed on the stars, and through a pathless way
Of unknown regions hurried on the day.
And now above, and now below they flew,
And near the earth the burning chariot drew.
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At once from life and from the chariot driv’n,
Th’ ambitious boy fell thunder-struck from heav’n.
The horses started with a sudden bound,
And flung the reins and chariot to the ground:
The studded harness from their necks they broke,
Here fell a wheel, and here a silver spoke,
Here were the beam and axle torn away;
And, scatter’d o’er the earth, the shining fragments lay.
The breathless Phaeton, with flaming hair.
Shot from the chariot, like a falling star.
That in a summer’s ev’ning from the top
Of heav’n drops down, or seems at least to drop;
Till on the Po his blasted corpse was hurled,
Far from his country, in the Western World.”

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The Milky Way. In Spanish El camino de Santiago; in the Northern Mythology the pathway of the ghosts going to Valhalla. ↩

Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII, Croxall’s Tr.:⁠—

“The soft’ning wax, that felt a nearer sun,
Dissolv’d apace, and soon began to run.
The youth in vain his melting pinions shakes,
His feathers gone, no longer air he takes.
O father, father, as he strove to cry,
Down to the sea he tumbled from on high.
And found his fate; yet still subsists by fame,
Among those waters that retain his name.
The father, now no more a father, cries.
Ho, Icarus! where are you? as he flies:
Where shall I seek my boy? he cries again.
And saw his feathers scattered on the main.”

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Lucan, Pharsalia I:⁠—

“To him the Balearic sling is slow.
And the shaft loiters from the Parthian bow.”

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Here begins the third division of the Inferno, embracing the Eighth and Ninth Circles, in which the Fraudulent are punished.

“But because fraud is man’s peculiar vice
More it displeases God; and so stand lowest
The fraudulent, and greater dole assails them.”

The Eighth Circle is called Malebolge, or Evil-budgets, and consists of ten concentric ditches, or Bolge of stone, with dikes between, and rough bridges running across them to the centre like the spokes of a wheel.

In the First Bolgia are punished Seducers, and in the Second, Flatterers. ↩

Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III p. 237, says:⁠—

“Our slates and granites are often of very lovely colors; but the Apennine limestone is so gray and toneless, that I know not any mountain district so utterly melancholy as those which are composed of this rock, when unwoodcd. Now, as far as I can discover from the internal evidence in his poem, nearly all Dante’s mountain wanderings had been upon this ground. He had journeyed once or twice among the Alps, indeed, but seems to have been impressed chiefly by the road from Garda to Trent, and that along the Cornice, both of which are either upon those limestones, or a dark serpentine, which shows hardly any color till it is polished. It is not ascertainable that he had ever seen rock scenery of the finely colored kind, aided by the Alpine mosses: I do not know the fall at Forli (Inferno, XVI 99), but every other scene to which he alludes is among these Apennine limestones; and when he wishes to give the idea of enormous mountain size, he names Tabernicch and Pietra-pana⁠—the one clearly chosen only for the sake of the