fortunati, as being creatures whose condition is not finally settled, as having still much to undergo, being subject to much uncertainty, and dependent as to the length and severity of their trials upon much that they cannot foresee or control (such as the efforts made on their behalf by the living), but never beati. It would seem, therefore, that Dante, when he made Virgil describe the rescue from Limbo, did not contemplate Cato's rescue as happening at that time. Moreover, Cato, when he was removed from Purgatory, was not removed in order that he might be taken to Heaven (' made blessed'), but that he might be constituted the warder of the Outside Purgatory; and this was an office for which there would be no occasion until Christians had lived and died repentant. Lastly, the words which Dante puts into Cato's mouth, when speaking of his removal from Limbo, appear to me to indicate that his deliverance was something separate and special. 'Marcia,' he says, speaking of his wife whom Dante had seen in Limbo,' was so pleasing in my eyes while I lived that whatever favours she would of me I performed. But now that she dwells beyond the evil river she can no longer move me, by that law which was made when I came forth thence.' There is, so far as I am aware, no indication in the Sacred Drama of any general law that souls in Paradise or in Purgatory (whether outside or inside the gate) should be wholly unmoved by the influence of souls in Limbo. On the contrary, Sordello, in the eighth canto of the Purgatory, says that it will give joy to the spirits who are singing the compline hymn in the Flowery Valley to see Virgil (whom he knows) and Dante (whom he believes) to be denizens of Limbo. And I am therefore disposed to think that this 'law' was a special condition made with Cato when he was taken from Hell on an occasion of special intervention, whether by an angel or otherwise, for the special and temporary purpose of receiving souls in Ante-Purgatory. But what was to happen to Cato when that temporary office should no longer be required? Did Dante contemplate that Cato should then return to Hell? Or did he destine him for Paradise? Scartazzini says that the words in which Virgil addresses him, 'Death for liberty was not bitter to thee in Utica, where thou didst leave the garment which at the Great Day shall be so bright,' prove that Dante contemplated his ultimate salvation. And, if that is so, Cato's case would undoubtedly be an exception to the principle that a good Pagan is not saved, and a contradiction to the doctrine enunciated by the Eagle, that the soul divorced from the body cannot repent and be saved. Dante does not suggest in Cato's case any such special revelation as he supposes in that of Ripheus. And we are not at liberty to suppose it. For, had Cato, like Ripheus, had a special revelation, and, like him, died a Christian, he would not have passed into Limbo. Perhaps Dante had not made up his own mind. on the subject. There are many things in the Sacred Drama which he deliberately left obscure, many passages in which he appears to desire to puzzle his readers. Perhaps the obscurity in which Cato's case is shrouded is a symptom of that mental struggle between deference to the doctrine of the patristic schoolmen and desire for something more catholic of which I propose to speak presently. However this may be, I am not satisfied that the words on which Scartazzini relies as showing that Cato was to be saved are sufficient for the purpose. I am not convinced that Cato's case is an exception to Dante's general rule that good Pagans are not saved. And I cannot but think it possible that, if Dante had declared the ultimate destiny of Cato, he would have felt constrained, in obedience to the teaching of theology, to relegate him to Hell. Cato's case, then, if it be an exception at all to the rule that good Pagans are not saved, is the only exception throughout the Sacred Drama. And I think that I have perhaps shown good cause for doubt whether it is such an exception. If it is not, the rule is absolute: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.' Dante, in his poem, accepts the law of the Church, as laid down in patristic theology, in all its terrible completeness, and conforms to it throughout his great work. But does it satisfy him? Does it express his genuine feeling? Can it be that his heart, so large and so tender in that narrow and cruel age, and his conscience, so honest and so sensitive in a time of general treachery and cynicism, are content with this doctrine? Does the consistently good life of a pre-Christian Pagan really appear to him worthless, or rather worthy of everlasting misery? answer is to be sought in his own writings. The In the fifth chapter of the fourth treatise of the Banquet, Dante declares that worthy Romans, from the beginning of the Republic to the time of C. J. Cæsar, were 'not human citizens of the State, but divine, whose patriotism was inspired by heavenly and not by human love.' He dares any one to maintain that the fortitude with which they sustained the severest trials and tortures for the commonwealth was the mere 'outcome of human nature,' or that those sufferings could have been so endured without divine assistance.' In measured but glowing language, breathing the spirit of true conviction, and so earnest that we can almost imagine him confronting and withstanding his great theological teacher St. Thomas himself, face to face, he challenges the assertion that these men were not, like Christian martyrs, supported by heavenly aid for the endurance of their sufferings.' It is impossible, he says, to regard the lives of such superhuman Italians as these without seeing clearly that to their own natural goodness was added the light of the goodness of God.' They and their actions were the work of God's own hands. The sentiments of Dante, as expressed in the Sacred Drama, are necessarily dominated by theology. He could not write of Hell and Purgatory and Heaven except under its guidance and in accord ance with its doctrines. But in his prose writings he is free from dogmatic trammels and can speak with the voice of natural and not of ecclesiastical religion. He is, of course, always, whether writing. in prose or in verse, a deeply religious man. But while in the Sacred Drama he writes as a religious Churchman, in the Banquet he writes as a religious layman. It is his lay mind, his unsectarian mind, his catholic mind that recognises the goodness of a Pagan to be as much and as truly heavenly as that of a Christian, bursts through the fetters of dogmatic theology, and refuses to be satisfied with the husks of scholasticism. That this lay mind could not acquiesce in the ecclesiastical doctrine that good Pagans are not saved, that he was continually asking himself such questions as, 'Where is the justice which condemns a man born in a remote part of Asia, such as the valley of the Indus, who all his life has had no opportunity of even hearing of the existence of Christianity, and who consequently, although, throughout his life, all his inclinations and his acts were good and sinless so far as human reason can perceive, dies unbaptised and without the Faith?' we learn from the address made to him by the Eagle in the nineteenth canto of the Paradise; and a disposition to revolt against this doctrine is suggested in many passages even of the Sacred Drama, although it is never throughout that poem allowed to take the form of overt opposition to the doctrine, but is severely restrained and not permitted to rise above the level of grief, pity, and overpowering distress. Virgil, the impersonation, in that work, of human reason, is choked by emotion when speaking, in the third canto of the Purgatory, of Aristotle, Plato, and other great men of antiquity, as languishing in the border of Hell. Dante, when, at his entry into that region, he is told by Virgil that that is the place to which he is condemned for lack of baptism and of knowing the true God, says: Great pain seized my heart when I heard him, because I perceived that folk of much worth were suspended in that Limbo.' And perhaps the most touching instance of this feeling is to be found in the Mantuan legend of St. Paul visiting the tomb of Virgil at Naples and weeping at the thought that if this 'greatest of poets' had lived but a little later he might have been converted and saved: Ad Maronis mausoleum Such feelings as these would not in that age, if indeed in any, have been excited by the sight of merited punishment. They spring from the sense, however much it may be controlled or disavowed, of causeless and undeserved suffering. The Italians, says J. A. Symonds in his Revival of Learning, were the first of European nations to emerge from mediæval bondage and become the apostles of Humanism for the modern world. And one of the causes of the powerful and undying interest that we take in Dante's writings is that they show us in all its freshness, pure from the extravagance of later Humanists, the earliest stages of this process of evolution. Dante is the harbinger of the dawn of the great conflict of medieval tradition with revived Paganism. He is the first leader of that 'passionate outgoing towards the ancient world' which, J. A. Symonds says, ' was one of the chief movements of the Renaissance.' If there is any truth in the observations which I have made in the course of my examination of this first principle of Dante's attitude towards Paganism--namely, the principle that good Pagans are not saved-if I am justified in thinking that while as a churchman he held that doctrine yet as a layman he abhorred it, I think that this consideration will enable us to understand how he could have reconciled this principle with that which I have called the second cardinal principle of that attitude-namely, that bad Pagans are punished in the same manner and degree as bad Christians. His statements in the Sacred Drama of the hopeless condition of good Pagans appear to me to be reluctantly made, as if dictated to him by an irresistible and inscrutable authority, and as if he had the greatest difficulty in bringing himself to believe anything so shocking to the moral sense. But his descriptions of the punishments of bad Pagans are written as if he cordially accepted them and sympathised with them. It is the language of the Banquet, and not that of the Sacred Drama, that to my mind explains this puzzle. If he had not really believed that goodness and badness were independent of doctrinal tenets he could not have punished bad Pagans in the same manner as bad Christians, or, at any rate, could not have done it with so much appearance of satisfaction. If the Church required him to hold the doctrine of the damnation of good Pagans, she did not impose upon him, at all events in the explicit manner in which he handles them, the details of what constitutes badness in a Pagan, or the mode in which it should be punished. She did not instruct him to place Capaneus on the 'horrible sand' under the 'swollen and slowly falling flakes of fire,' as a punishment for not submitting himself to those deities whom Virgil calls the 'false and lying Gods.' She did not teach him to make Jason walk, in company with Christian deceivers and seducers, in the eternal circuit, under the lash of demons. However much she may have condemned divination as a practice for Christians, who had had the mystery of Revelation and all the scheme of Providence unfolded to them, she did not direct him to make the blind seer of Thebes, so well known to us by the striking part that he performs in Sophocles's tragedy of Edipus on the Throne, pace everlastingly backwards with distorted head in company with Michael Scot and the Cobbler of Parma, for the sin of wishing to see too far ahead.' She did not tell him to measure out to Ulysses and Diomede the same suffering as to Guido da Montefeltro. Still less did she call upon him to regard the guilt of Brutus and Cassius as parallel with that of Judas Iscariot, and to place those three sinners together in the very jaws of Satan. His treatment of the punishments of bad Pagans is derived not from theological but from natural religion. While forced by his allegiance to the dictates of the Church to relegate good Pagans to Hell, he does what he can, like an equitable judge, to mitigate the severity of the sentence of ecclesiastical law. Though constrained to banish them from the effulgence of Heaven and the radiance of the sun, he does not deprive them altogether of light, or plunge them in that foul murky darkness which to an Italian was one of the chief horrors of the nether world. He gives to them a special hemisphere of brightness, shining perpetually over a restricted but well-illuminated region. He allots them many of the adornments and embellishments of medieval comfort and refinement-anoble castle, seven times girdled by lofty walls, guarded all round by a beauteous rivulet,' and having in its centre a 'meadow of fresh verdure.' They stand or recline in groups on the ' enamelled green,' wrapped in thought, or enjoying communion with the greatest poets, orators, philosophers, statesmen, heroes, and heroines of antiquity, neither sad nor yet gay,' gazing steadfastly, speaking calmly with sweet voices,' and receiving him, when brought to them by Virgil, with all the grave courtesy of chivalry. Their only suffering is their hopeless longing for Heaven. The suffering is distinctively ecclesiastical. The mitigations are secular, natural, the creation of the lay mind, compelled to deliver the sentence of the higher tribunal, but accommodating that sentence, so far as it can, to the dictates of Humanism. But he feels that no such accommodation is required in the treatment of bad Pagans. They have offended against the natural law of right and wrong, and must take the consequences. 6 It is, says J. A. Symonds, the variety of spiritual elements in combination and solution that makes the psychology of Dante at once so fascinating and so difficult to analyse. This variety is due to the beginning of the revival of learning, causing a confusion of influences classical and mediæval, Christian and Pagan, and producing an imperfect blend of ecclesiastical tradition with idealised Paganism. Many examples of this confusion will readily occur to the student of the Sacred Drama; and he will remember how they startled and interested him when he first began his readings in that wonderful poem. To a beginner in Italian literature it is surprising to find Dante putting into the mouth of an angel from Heaven, as in the ninth canto of the Hell, words which imply that the resistance of |