We have only to look at the portraits of the two poets, the one by Giotto, the other by Faithorn, to see the difference of their characters. Of the former, Mr. Macaulay observes, with his usual felicity, "No person can look on the features, noble even to ruggedness, the dark furrows of the cheek, the haggard and woful stare of the eye, the sullen and contemptuous curve of the lip, and doubt that they belong to a man too proud and too sensitive to be happy." In the portrait of Milton, taken when he was six years older than the age at which Dante died, we discern seriousness, rendered probably more severe by his want of vision, but the calmness and dignity resulting from inward peace of mind, as of one whose thoughts were habitually 'nigh sphered in heaven.' Nothing therefore can be more unlike than the aspects of these two illustrious poets. The same difference we discern in their poetic characters. In vigour they are alike; in perception of beauty, whether in the moral or the natural world, we cannot pronounce either to be inferior; yet perhaps the Terrestrial Paradise is richer and more varied in natural charms in the Paradise Lost than in the Purgatorio. In sublimity we give the palm to the English, in tenderness and pathos to the Tuscan, poet; we do not think that Dante could have written the two first books of Paradise Lost, we feel almost certain that Milton could not have narrated the sad tale of Francesca da Rimini, or the horrid fate of Count Ugolino, as they are narrated in the Inferno. As strong feeling of one kind is usually united with strong feelings of other kinds, so in Dante there is an intensity and bitterness of satire of which the calmer nature and more pious spirit of Milton was incapable. In vividness of representation and graphic power we must award the prize to Dante. His life was one of wandering, he had traversed the plain, the vale and the mountain, he had probably dwelt in the cot as well as the palace, and hence his similies and descriptions, being actual transcripts from nature, present the objects themselves to our senses. Milton, as we have already observed, saw life and nature chiefly through the medium of books, and hence we rarely meet in him with that accuracy of

observation which distinguishes Dante. We would liken Milton to Raphael and those artists who, taking their sketches from nature, give reins to imagination and produce pieces beyond what actual nature presents; while Dante may be in general compared with those who are called Preraphaelites, who copy nature faithfully and accurately, but rarely venture to go beyond her. In fact, he usually presents to us as a simile, the very object that he has copied. Milton also was quite devoid of, and Dante possessed in the highest degree, that power by which Swift makes us almost believe in the existence of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, when by seriousness of tone and manner, minuteness and circumstantiality of narrative, and apparent anxiety for accuracy, the writer would fain persuade us of the actual truth of what he is telling us.* In learning, Milton, of course, as born at a later period, and after the invention of printing, had the superiority. We also think that he may have possessed more dramatic power and talent than the Italian poet, whose country has never signalized itself in the higher departments of the drama.

We come now to the poems, and here also we fail to recognize much similarity. In Paradise Lost, the poet, as we have seen, related what he regarded as real events, and even his descriptions of places beyond this visible diurnal sphere' had in his conception a certain degree of reality. The Commedia, on the contrary, the true reason of its bearing that title is probably all its personages being masked,—is confessedly allegoric, with a secret meaning in every line and almost in every word. How then can we compare them? Milton's Heaven and Hell are real material places lying out in the vast regions of space; the Inferno and Paradiso of Dante, though real too, but in a different sense, are, as will appear, on this earth, and even in Italy. In structure and design the poems also are quite unlike. We may compare Paradise Lost to a magnificent temple of the Doric order, rich in material, simple in design, intended to last for ages, inspiring each successive generation with sentiments of piety and veneration; * This did not escape Mr. Macaulay.

while the Commedia-which has, we think, been erroneously compared to a vast pile of Gothic architecture, for there is in it nothing merely ornamental, every part, however minute, having its use and application-may best be likened, having the Inferno chiefly in view, to a maze or labyrinth, involved in circles and bewildered with partitions, in which the stranger is almost certain to lose his way till he is furnished with a ground-plan, when, to his surprise, he finds that all is regular and formed on a determined plan. The structure too was designed by its author to answer only a temporary purpose; and had the event which it was intended to produce early taken place, it would have been left to sink into oblivion, if not preserved by its poetic merits.

In the time of Dante, as we learn from his own writings and those of Petrarca and Boccaccio, it was an established dogma, that poetry and other works of imagination had, and should have, beside the literal sense, one or more secret senses. Of these senses Dante enumerates four,-the literal, the allegoric, the moral, and the anagogic.* He gives as an example the psalm, In exitu Israel de Ægypto, etc., where he says the allegoric sense is, our redemption through Christ; the moral, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to a state of grace; the anagogic, the passage of a holy soul from the servitude of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. This notion probably had its origin in the Midrashes or allegoric interpretations of the Rabbin, which were adopted and imitated by the Fathers, and hence the typology, etc. of Scripture. Of all the classic poets, Virgil was the one in whom this principle was supposed to prevail most; every line of the Bucolics and Eneis was regarded as pregnant with secret meaning. Over and over again Petrarca declares such to be his belief.

Dante in his letter to Can Grande della Scala tells him that

* Litera gesta refert, quid credas Allegoria,
Moralis quid agas, quid speres Anagogia.

We know not who composed these verses. The second and third senses, it should be observed, are often the same.

the secret "subject of his poem ís man, in as far as, by merit or demerit, after the freedom of his will, he is obnoxious to the rewards or penalties of Justice;" on which an old commentator observes: "So that from these words you may infer that, according to the allegoric sense, the poet treats of that Hell in which, travelling as wayfarers, we are capable of merit or demerit;" i. e. that the Hell, and consequently the Purgatory and the Paradise, of the poem, are on this earth and in this life. Dante himself tells us repeatedly that there is a deep and secret sense in his verses. On one occasion he cries

out:

O voi che avete gl' intelletti sani,
Mirate la dottrina, che s' asconde
Sotto il velame delli versi strani.

Now, as religion is plainly the second or allegoric sense, and the moral sense is too plain and obvious to be the subject of such anxious concealment and mystery, the natural inquiry is, what is the anagogic or most important sense? This, we think, is clearly told in the inscription on the poet's tomb at Ravenna, said to have been composed by himself:

Jura Monarchiæ, Superos, Phlegethonta, Lacusque
Lustrando, cecini, voluerunt Fata quousque, etc.

That is to say, that the object of the poem was political,namely, the diffusion of Ghibellinism, the cause of the Emperor, in opposition to Guelfism, or that of the Papacy. The God of the poem is the Emperor, the vicegerent of the Deity on earth; his adversary the Pope is therefore Lucifer. Hell is the world, or rather Italy, under the one; Paradise is the same under its rightful sovereign. The Inferno is, in this view, the most terrific satire ever written, and deeply therefore did it concern the poet to veil its secret and real sense so closely that it should only be known to the initiated.

From what precedes, the reader will perceive that we have embraced the theory of Rossetti on this subject. We confess the fact, and are ready to take our share of the scoffs and sneers of ignorance, prejudice, and malevolence; for in all

that has been written against Rossetti, we have discerned nothing else. It is now nearly a quarter of a century since we first became acquainted with his theory, by reading the Spirito Antipapale. Before we had gone through a hundred pages of that work, we saw clearly that that theory was the truth. We have since read this and his other writingst over and over again; we have studied and meditated on the works of Dante, Petrarca, and others, and our conviction has become stronger and stronger each day; and if we possess any character for sense and judgement, we are willing to stake it on the issue of this question. We will at the same time boldly assert that we feel ourselves to be as capable of forming an opinion on it as any of Rossetti's critics. The day, we are confident, will come when the work left incomplete by Rossetti, for want of encouragement, will be taken up and perfected; not in England certainly, for the English mind is most alien from such studies, nor do we think in Italy, or even in France, but in Germany, where the theories started elsewhere, as in the case of Beaufort and Astruc, are carried out to their utmost limits. The literature of the Middle Ages, now so enigmatic, will then become clear, and the secret doctrine which pervades it be developed and explained.

* See two articles in those extinct Reviews, the Foreign and the British and Foreign, evidently by the same hand, and the poor and feeble article by A. W. Schlegel in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The French writers Ozanam and Delécluze have treated Rossetti with respect and courtesy.

These are the Comento on the Inferno, the Spirito Antipapale, the Amor Platonico, and the Beatrice, of which only the First Part was published. Rossetti entrusted the MS. for translation to a Frenchman named Aroux, who, instead of translating it, has written a work of his own from Rossetti's works, hardly noticing his authority.

The allegories of the Faery Queen have never been fully explained. It is now a century since Upton's edition was published, and nothing has been done since; for Todd's is, like his Milton, mere compilation. Upton's edition is not to be had, and half a century has not exhausted a single impression of Todd's. Much remains to be done by a sagacious editor. We may also notice the slow sale of our own Mythology of Greece and Italy, as a proof of this turn of the English mind. Even the Fairy Mythology is generally regarded as a collection of absurd or amusing stories, rather than as what it is a part of the philosophy of fiction.

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