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Butler — Dante. 
The Divine Comedy is original in form and pressure owing to 
its writer’s religio-political tenets. We read in Genesis: “God 
made two great lights. ” One of these lights, according to Dante, 
was the Pope and the other the King. They were not related 
like sun and moon, but coequal like two suns. The king was 
once represented by the Roman Caesars, one of whom, Trajan, 
was even saved, being baptized by miracle. The Roman eagle 
was “ the bird of God. ” Afterward German emperors, heads 
of the Holy Roman empire, stood for the king. The papal and 
the imperial luminary has each its own orbit. If either en¬ 
croaches on the domain of the other, they no longer discourse 
heavenly music, but grate harsh thunder. Now such an en¬ 
croachment ensues whenever the spiritual light grasps temporal 
power, or the secular light meddles with spiritualities. Some 
such encroachments are drawn to the life in Dante’s vision. 
Thus, concerning the arrest of a pope by the French it is said: 
“ Lo! the flower-de-luce 
Enters Alagna: in his vicar, Christ 
Himself a captive, and his mockery 
Acted again. Lo! to his holy lip 
The vinegar and gall once more are pressed, 
And he twixt living robbers doomed to bleed. 
Lo! the new Pilate of whose cruelty 
Such violence cannot fill the measure up.” 
On the other hand, when a pontiff was a simoniac, like Boni¬ 
face, Dante, while kissing the pope’s toe, not only ties the 
hands of the simoniac but points out, in the lowest hell save 
one, the niche he was ordained to fill. 
The actors in atrocities, whether sovereign or sacerdotal,— 
Dante beheld each in his own place. Thus at the seventh in¬ 
fernal circle, which was redolent of more stenches than Coleridge 
counted in Cologne, he came to a tomb inscribed: “Pope 
Anastatius , whom Photinus seduced from the right way. ” But 
behold how the whirligig of time brings in his revenges! Mod¬ 
ern critics maintain that Dante was here misled by the old and 
blundering chronicler, and that the Anastatius whom Photinus 
turned into a heretic was not the pope of that name but an 
emperor. 
If our poet has now discovered his mistake, he has doubtless 
laughed outright at himself, as he tells us Pope Gregory did 
on entering heaven, since the first thing he noticed there was 
