His Quotations and His Originality . 
153 
'Te Deum, Salve Regina, Summce, Deus clementice. His ger- 
archy, or nine-fold orders of the heavenly host—angels, arch¬ 
angels, principalities, powers, dominions, virtues, thrones, cher¬ 
ubim and seraphim — had all been prepared for him by the 
pseudonymous Dionysius, the Areopagite. The seven mortal 
sins, already defined ex cathedrd as wrath, gluttony, lust, pride, 
envy, avarice, and sloth, not only suggested but dictated and di¬ 
versified both seven circles in hell where they were punished, 
and seven circles in purgatory where they were expiated, or 
washed out. 
The era of his pilgrimage was that very year of jubilee when 
more pilgrims than ever before, and among them probably Dante 
himself, flocked to Rome. Thus his poem may then and there 
have first come into his mind. Some of its images were avow- 
edly derived from that oecumenical convocation. 
Long-established lessons to catechumens led to an analogous 
catechising of Dante through several cantos at the gate of 
heaven by Peter, James and John, and marked out the lines of 
his examination. Prom school divines, and principally from 
Thomas Aquinas who died in Dante’s ninth year, the poet was 
a snapper up of countless unconsidered trifles— such words as 
ubi, quando, quia, quiddity, substance and essence in scholastic 
senses, and the subtleties they embody. Thus distinguishing 
and dividing hairs, he condensed folios as we cork up the fra¬ 
grance of a garden in a vinaigrette of rose ottar. 
The fashion of verse in Dante’s vision — the Terza-Rima -— had 
been made ready for him by troubadours and trouveres — by 
Guinicelli and Cavalcanti. He thrust into it many scraps of 
Latin with now and then a vocable of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, 
or tongues yet more outlandish, and eight lines at once of 
Provencal gibberish quoted from Arnaldo. At first glance his 
diction recalls the Babylonish dialect of patched and piebald 
languages in Hudibras. 
As to Dantesque minutiae we note with surprise that so many 
of them seem to have been received by tradition from more 
ancient travelers through the world unseen. For one instance, 
we observe Dante in purgatory discovering that spirits there 
had lost their shadows while he retained his own. But the 
