20 
DANTE’S “INFERNO.” 
By REV. W. 8. MATTHEWS, B.A. 2nd February, 1904. 
“The Divine Comedy” was written during the last twenty 
years of Dante’s life spent in exile from his beloved Florence. 
It consists of the three parts, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, each 
written and published separately, and as the poet himself tells 
us, has many meanings—one literal, the others allegorical. 
Taken allegorically, according to the same authority, its subject 
is man—how by his merits and demerits in exercising free will, 
he is exposed to the rewards aud penalties of justice. ‘Thus 
through Hell and Purgatory the way is shown by Virgil, but by 
the Lady Beatrice through Paradise, Now Virgil represents 
Reason or Human Wisdom, which of itself is sufficient to point 
out the horrors of sin, and to guide us through the struggles of 
repentance to the Harthly Paradise, but can go no further. ‘To 
reach the Beatific Vision there is need of the Divine and Heavenly 
Wisdom which Beatrice symbolises :—‘‘ All the wisdom divinely 
revealed to man, to raise him above earthly things, and bring 
him near to God.” It is, however, upon the literal meaning of 
the poem—the Vision, not the allegory—that the Lecturer directed 
the attention of the audience. The Vision described in language 
always implying that the poet was recalling and relating a real 
personal experience, and as such it was received by those to whom 
it was first addressed. Dante was greeted in the streets of Verona 
as the man who had ‘seen Hell.” This Hell, then, is purely 
a medieval one. It is pictured as a funnel-shaped cavity, 
stretching from the neighbourhood of Jerusalem and Mount 
Calvary to the centre of the earth, whence an upward passage 
leads again to the surface of the earth in the Southern Hemis- 
phere, at the foot of the Mountain of Purgatory. This funnel, 
rapidly contracting as 1t descends, is divided into nine concentric 
circles, in which the different classes of sinners are separately 
punished. 
In the character of the conductor of a party, the Lecturer, 
without the aid of any notes, detailed the passage taken by Dante 
with his guide Virgil through Hell. Dante, in the thirty-fifth 
year of his age, went boldly forward with Virgil and soon came 
to the grim gate with the inscription ‘“‘ Leave all hope, ye that 
come here,” or, as Cary translated it, ‘‘ All hope abandon, ye who 
enter here.” Hand in hand they passed through into the 
