glia."

A natural, but strange, and surely not sufficiently dignified image for
the occasion. It is difficult to be quite content with a former one, in
which the greetings of St. Peter and St. James are compared to those of
doves murmuring and sidling round about one another; though Christian
sentiment may warrant it, if we do not too strongly present the Apostles
to one's imagination.]

[Footnote 48:

"Tal ne la sembianza sua divenne,
Qual diverebbe Giove, s' egli e Marte
Fossero augelli e cambiassersi penne."

Nobody who opened the Commedia for the first time at this fantastical
image would suppose the author was a great poet, or expect the
tremendous passage that ensues!]

[Footnote 49: In spite of the unheavenly nature of invective, of
something of a lurking conceit in the making an eclipse out of a blush,
and in the positive bathos, and I fear almost indecent irrelevancy of
the introduction of Beatrice at all on such an occasion, much more under
the feeble aspect of one young lady blushing for another,--this scene
altogether is a very grand one; and the violence itself of the holy
invective awful.

A curious subject for reflection is here presented. What sort of pope
would Dante himself have made? Would he have taken to the loving or the
hating side of his genius? To the St. John or the St. Peter of his own
poem? St. Francis or St. Dominic?--I am afraid, all things considered,
we should have had in him rather a Gregory the Seventh or Julius
the Second, than a Benedict the Eleventh or a Ganganelli. What fine
Church-hymns he would have written!]

[Footnote 50: She does not see (so blind is even holy vehemence!) that
for the same reason the denouncement itself is out of its place. The
preachers brought St. Anthony and his pig into their pulpits; she brings
them into Heaven!]

[Footnote 51:

"Certo io credo
Che solo il suo fattor tutta la goda." ]

[Footnote 52: The Emperor Henry of Luxembourg, Dante's idol; at the
close of whose brief and inefficient appearance in Italy, his hopes of
restoration to his country were at an end.]

[Footnote 53: Pope Clement the Fifth. Dante's enemy, Boniface, was now
dead, and of course in Tartarus, in the red-hot tomb which the poet had
prepared for him.]

[Footnote 54: Boniface himself. Pope Clement's red hot feet are to
thrust down Pope Boniface into a gulf still hotter. So says the gentle
Beatrice in Heaven, and in the face of all that is angelical!]

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