His Quotations and His Originality. 161 
that his book on the celestial hierarchy was all a ridiculous 
blunder. 
Another Pope, namely, Celestine, Dante had observed in the 
infernal vestibule, among wretches who would never know they 
were born but for the stings of wasps, mosquitoes and vermin 
yet more vile. 
Whoever, no matter of what age or clime, had helped or hind¬ 
ered the advancement of the ecclesiastical or the governmental 
ideal, comes into judgment, and is doomed. 
Poetical justice is dispensed. Sowers of discord pace a 
treadmill routine and every now and then are cleft in twain, 
the envious grope with eyelids sewed up, the heads of fortune-tel¬ 
lers are so twisted that their chins hang over their backbones, 
and suicides are pent up in trees while their bodies hang on 
stakes beside them. The proud are crushed to the ground under 
burdens grievous to be borne, and Satan, the first-born of pride, 
stands frozen in the very center of the globe, where all the weight 
of the world, drawing from every side, presses upon him. Non¬ 
committals, or fence-men, perhaps fare worst of all. Creatures 
who never were really alive, and whom heaven and hell both 
hate, they are outcasts from both, and have no hope even of 
death. Too mean to live, too weak to die. 
In contrast to all this, the noble army of well-doers, down¬ 
ward from the earliest martyr, saint and prophet, are seen in a 
glory ever-brightening. Most of these personages bring to 
the pilgrim’s mind their opposites, or counterfeits, still bur¬ 
dening the earth. Hence his ebullitions of satire. These are 
so hot and venomous that their victims must have felt them¬ 
selves already bitten by infernal serpents and scorched in in¬ 
fernal fires. Such Parthian arrows shot back to the earth by 
one retreating from it, heighten the human interest of his ad¬ 
ventures. They thrill us like vengeful furies lurking in the 
back-ground of Greek tragedy. In this line Michelangelo imi¬ 
tated Dante, and painted a dignitary he hated among the 
damned. When the Pope begged the artist to place him in 
better company, the answer was: “Were he in Purgatory you 
could take him out, but in the Inferno he is beyond help. " 
Dante is original in his types of woman. The female spirits 
11 
