Eis Quotations and His Originality. 
151 
Their lying mythology he swallows as gospel truth. His hun¬ 
dred cantos are viewed by many as only an expansion of the 
sixth book of Virgil. In traversing the spirit-world he finds 
Charon the ferryman and Minos the judge and tells us that he 
followed Virgil’s hero, though far his inferior. He was guided 
by Virgil as iEneas had been by the Sibyl; he met his ancestor 
Cacciaguida, as iEneas had met his father Anchises, and both 
heard prophecies from their progenitors. Both tried thrice to 
embrace a friend among the shades. Old familiar scenes which 
JEneas saw frescoed on Carthaginian walls Dante gazed at in 
sculpture on the purgatorial pavement. Cato is a warden at the 
gate of Purgatory, and had expounded equity among Virgilian 
spirits. Dante had been vouchsafed Virgil as guide, philosopher 
and friend, through all his dark and dolorous pilgrimage, and 
he hence considered himself entitled to all Virgilian treasures. 
You will perceive in Cary forty specifications where the disci¬ 
ple has appropriated something from the master. He sometimes 
takes a line out and out, as this: Manibus date lilia plenis. 
In twenty-seven cases, or more, Ovid was laid under contri¬ 
bution. His metamorphoses of Cadmus into a snake and 
Arethusa into a fountain are specimens of scores which Dante 
has repeated. Valerius Maximus, Lucretius, Cicero, Lucan and 
Statius are not the only other classics called on for a Dantesque 
tribute. 
Such sons of ancient genius helped our mediaeval bard, so 
far as he could be helped, in more than one emergency. Thus 
spirits emaciated and hunger-bitten were grasping at fruit on a 
tantalizing tree. “How,” it was asked, “could spirits who 
had no need of food pine away for lack of it? ” The answer was: 
“ That is no more a mystery than that, when Meleager’s mother 
threw a certain stick into the fire, he pined away in sympathetic 
suffering, and died when the wood was consumed. ” No more mys¬ 
terious than that — not a whit more. 
We read in Dante; 
‘ ‘ Between two viands equally removed 
And tempting, a free man would die of hunger, 
Ere either he could bring unto his teeth.” 
He had obtained this paradox, as it used to be thought, from 
