ing, not only the degree, but the nature of their enjoyment.
We think that we see him standing amidst those smiling and radiant
spirits with that scowl of unutterable misery on his brow, and that curl
of bitter disdain on his lips, which all his portraits have preserved,
and which might furnish Chantrey with hints for the head of his
projected Satan.

There is no poet whose intellectual and moral character are so closely
connected. The great source, as it appears to me, of the power of the
Divine Comedy is the strong belief with which the story seems to be
told. In this respect, the only books which approach to its excellence
are Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. The solemnity of his
asseverations, the consistency and minuteness of his details, the
earnestness with which he labours to make the reader understand the
exact shape and size of everything that he describes, give an air of
reality to his wildest fictions. I should only weaken this statement
by quoting instances of a feeling which pervades the whole work, and to
which it owes much of its fascination. This is the real justification
of the many passages in his poem which bad critics have condemned as
grotesque. I am concerned to see that Mr Cary, to whom Dante owes more
than ever poet owed to translator, has sanctioned an accusation utterly
unworthy of his abilities. "His solicitude," says that gentleman, "to
define all his images in such a manner as to bring them within the
circle of our vision, and to subject them to the power of the pencil,
renders him little better than grotesque, where Milton has since taught
us to expect sublimity." It is true that Dante has never shrunk from
embodying his conceptions in determinate words, that he has even given
measures and numbers, where Milton would have left his images to float
undefined in a gorgeous haze of language. Both were right. Milton
did not profess to have been in heaven or hell. He might therefore
reasonably confine himself to magnificent generalities. Far different
was the office of the lonely traveller, who had wandered through the
nations of the dead. Had he described the abode of the rejected spirits
in language resembling the splendid lines of the English Poet,--had he
told us of--

"An universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good,
Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds
Perverse all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, unut