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

speakcth a lie, he speaketh of his own; for he is a liar, and the father of it.”

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The Seventh Bolgia, in which Thieves are punished. ↩

The sun enters Aquarius during the last half of January, when the Equinox is near, and the hoarfrost in the morning looks like snow on the fields, but soon evaporates. If Dante had been a monk of Monte Casino, illuminating a manuscript, he could not have made a more clerkly and scholastic flourish with his pen than this, nor have painted a more beautiful picture than that which follows. The medieval poets are full of lovely descriptions of Spring, which seems to blossom and sing through all their verses; but none is more beautiful or suggestive than this, though serving only as an illustration. ↩

In Canto I. ↩

See what Mr. Ruskin says of Dante as “a notably bad climber,” Note 160. ↩

The ascent of the Mount of Purgatory. ↩

The next circular dike, dividing the fosses. ↩

This list of serpents is from Lucan, Pharsalia IX 711, Rowe’s Tr.:⁠—

“Slimy Chelyders the parched earth distain
And trace a reeking furrow on the plain.
The spotted Cenchris, rich in various dyes,
Shoots in a line, and forth directly flies.
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The Swimmer there the crystal stream pollutes,
And swift thro’ air the flying Javelin shoots.
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The Amphisbaena doubly armed appears
At either end a threatening head she rears;
Raised on his active tail Pareas stands,
And as he passes, furrows up the sands.”

Milton, Paradise Lost, X 521:⁠—

“Dreadful was the din
Of hissing through the hall, thick-swarming now
With complicated monsters head and tail,
Scorpion, and asp, and amphisbaena dire,
Cerastes horned, hydrus, and elops drear, And dipsas.”

Of the Phareas, Peter Comestor, Historia Scholastica, Gloss of Genesis 3:1, says:⁠—

“And this he (Lucifer) did by means of the serpent; for then it was erect like man; being afterwards made prostrate by the curse; and it is said the Phareas walks erect even to this day.”

Of the amphisbaena, Brunetto Latini, Tresor I v 140, says:⁠—

“The Amphimenie is a kind of serpent which has two heads; one in its right place, and the other in the tail; and with each she can bite; and she runs swiftly, and her eyes shine like candles.”

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Without a hiding-place, or the heliotrope, a precious stone of great virtue against poisons, and supposed to render the wearer invisible. Upon this latter vulgar error is founded Boccaccio’s comical story of Calandrino and his friends Bruno and Buffulmacco, Decameron, Gior. VIII, Nov. 3. ↩

Brunetto Latini, Tresor I v 164, says of the Phoenix:⁠—

“He goeth to a good tree, savory and of good odor, and maketh a pile thereof, to which he setteth fire, and entereth straightway into it toward the rising of the sun.”

And Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1697:⁠—

“So Virtue, given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay erewhile a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deemed;
And, though her body die, her fame survives
A secular bird ages of lives.”

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Any obstruction, “such as the epilepsy,” says Benvenuto. “Gouts and dropsies, catarrhs and oppilations,” says Jeremy Taylor. ↩

Vanni Fucci, who calls himself a mule, was a bastard son of Fuccio de’ Lazzari. All the commentators paint him in the darkest colors. Dante had known him as “a man of blood and wrath,” and seems to wonder he is here, and not in the circle of the Violent, or of the Irascible. But his great crime was the robbery of a sacristy. Benvenuto da Imola relates the story in detail. He speaks of him as a man of depraved life, many of whose misdeeds went unpunished, because he was of noble family. Being banished from Pistoia for his crimes, he returned to the city one night of the Carnival, and was in company with eighteen other revellers, among whom was Vanni della Nona, a notary; when, not content with their insipid diversions, he stole away with two companions to the church of San Giacomo, and, finding its custodians absent, or asleep with feasting and drinking, he entered the sacristy and robbed it of all its precious jewels. These he secreted in the house of the notary, which was close at hand, thinking that on account of his honest repute no suspicion would fall upon him. A certain Rampino was arrested for the theft, and put to the torture; when Vanni Fucci, having escaped to Monte Carelli, beyond the Florentine jurisdiction, sent a messenger to Rampino’s father, confessing all the circumstances of the crime. Hereupon the notary was seized “on the first Monday in Lent, as he was going to a sermon in the church of the Minorite Friars,” and was hanged for the theft, and Rampino set at liberty.

No one has a good word to say for Vanni Fucci, except the Canonico Crescimbeni, who, in the “Comentarj” to the Istoria della Volg. Poesia, II ii, p. 99, counts him among the Italian Poets, and speaks of him as a man of great courage and gallantry, and a leader of the Neri party of Pistoia, in 1300. He smooths over Dante’s invectives by remarking that Dante “makes not too honorable mention of him in the Comedy”; and quotes a sonnet of his, which is pathetic from its utter despair and self-reproach:⁠—

“For I have lost the good I might have had
Through little wit, and not of mine own will.”

It is like the wail of a lost soul, and the same in tone as the words which Dante here puts into his mouth. Dante may have heard him utter similar selfaccusations while living, and seen on his