| “Tristi fummo Nel aer dolce, che del sol s’allegra, Or ci attristiam, nella belletta negra.” “We once were sad, In the sweet air, made gladsome by the sun, Now in these murky settlings are we sad.”[148] Cary. |
The virtue usually opposed to this vice of sullenness is Alacritas, uniting the sense of activity and cheerfulness. Spenser has cheerfulness simply, in his description, never enough to be loved or praised, of the virtues of Womanhood; first feminineness or womanhood in specialty; then,—
| “Next to her sate goodly Shamefastnesse, Ne ever durst, her eyes from ground upreare, Ne ever once did looke up from her desse,[149] As if some blame of evill she did feare That in her cheekes made roses oft appeare: And her against sweet Cherefulnesse was placed, Whose eyes, like twinkling stars in evening cleare, Were deckt with smyles that all sad humours chaced. “And next to her sate sober Modestie, Holding her hand upon her gentle hart; And her against, sate comely Curtesie, That unto every person knew her part; And her before was seated overthwart Soft Silence, and submisse Obedience, Both linckt together never to dispart.” |
§ LX. Another notable point in Dante’s system is the intensity of uttermost punishment given to treason, the peculiar sin of Italy, and that to which, at this day, she attributes her own misery with her own lips. An Italian, questioned as to the causes of the failure of the campaign of 1848, always makes one answer, “We were betrayed;” and the most melancholy feature of the present state of Italy is principally this, that she does not see that, of all causes to which failure might be attributed, this is at once the most disgraceful, and the most hopeless. In fact, Dante seems to me to have written almost prophetically, for the instruction of modern Italy, and chiefly so in the sixth canto of the “Purgatorio.”
§ LXI. Hitherto we have been considering the system of the “Inferno” only. That of the “Purgatorio” is much simpler, it being divided into seven districts, in which the souls are severally purified from the sins of Pride, Envy, Wrath, Indifference, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust; the poet thus implying in opposition, and describing in various instances, the seven virtues of Humility, Kindness,[150] Patience, Zeal, Poverty, Abstinence, and Chastity, as adjuncts of the Christian character, in which it may occasionally fail, while the essential group of the three theological and four cardinal virtues are represented as in direct attendance on the chariot of the Deity; and all the sins of Christians are in the seventeenth canto traced to the deficiency or aberration of Affection.
§ LXII. The system of Spenser is unfinished, and exceedingly complicated, the same vices and virtues occurring under different forms in different places, in order to show their different relations to each other. I shall not therefore give any general sketch of it, but only refer to the particular personification of each virtue in order to compare it with that of the Ducal Palace.[151] The peculiar superiority of his system is in its exquisite setting forth of Chastity under the figure of Britomart; not monkish chastity, but that of the purest Love. In completeness of personification no one can approach him; not even in Dante do I remember anything quite so great as the description of the Captain of the Lusts of the Flesh:
| “As pale and wan as ashes was his looke; His body lean and meagre as a rake; And skin all withered like a dryed rooke; Thereto as cold and drery as a snake; That seemed to tremble evermore, and quake: All in a canvas thin he was bedight, And girded with a belt of twisted brake: Upon his head he wore an helmet light, Made of a dead man’s skull.” |
He rides upon a tiger, and in his hand is a bow, bent;
| “And many arrows under his right side, Headed with flint, and fethers bloody dide.” |