[Footnote 35: A masterly allegory of Worldly Pleasure. But the close of it in the original has an intensity of the revolting, which outrages the last recesses of feeling, and disgusts us with the denouncer.]
[Footnote 36: The fierce Hugh Capet, soliloquising about the Virgin in the tones of a lady in child-bed, is rather too ludicrous an association of ideas. It was for calling this prince the son of a butcher, that Francis the First prohibited the admission of Dante's poem into his dominions. Mr. Cary thinks the king might have been mistaken in his interpretation of the passage, and that "butcher" may be simply a metaphorical term for the blood-thirstiness of Capet's father. But when we find the man called, not the butcher, or that butcher, or butcher in reference to his species, but in plain local parlance "a butcher of Paris" (un beccaio di Parigi), and when this designation is followed up by the allusion to the extinction of the previous dynasty, the ordinary construction of the words appears indisputable. Dante seems to have had no ground for what his aristocratical pride doubtless considered a hard blow, and what King Francis, indeed, condescended to feel as such. He met with the notion somewhere, and chose to believe it, in order to vex the French and their princes. The spirit of the taunt contradicts his own theories elsewhere; for he has repeatedly said, that the only true nobility is in the mind. But his writings (poetical truth excepted) are a heap of contradictions.]
[Footnote 37: Mr. Cary thought he had seen an old romance in which there is a combat of this kind between Jesus and his betrayer. I have an impression to the same effect.]
[Footnote 38:
"O Signor mio, quando sarò io lieto
A veder la vendetta the nascosa
Fa dolce l'ira tua nel tuo segreto!"
The spirit of the blasphemous witticism attributed to another Italian, viz. that the reason why God prohibited revenge to mankind was its being "too delicate a morsel for any but himself," is here gravely anticipated as a positive compliment to God by the fierce poet of the thirteenth century, who has been held up as a great Christian divine! God hugs revenge to his bosom with delight! The Supreme Being confounded with a poor grinning Florentine!]
[Footnote 39: A ludicrous anti-climax this to modern ears! The allusion is to the Pygmalion who was Dido's brother, and who murdered her husband, the priest Sichæus, for his riches. The term "parricide" is here applied in its secondary sense of—the murderer of any one to whom we owe reverence.]
[Footnote 40: Heliodorus was a plunderer of the Temple, thus supernaturally punished. The subject has been nobly treated by Raphael.]
[Footnote 41: A grand and beautiful fiction.]
[Footnote 42: Readers need hardly be told that there is no foundation for this fancy, except in the invention of the churchmen. Dante, in another passage, not necessary to give, confounds the poet Statius who was from Naples, with a rhetorician of the same name from Thoulouse.]