382 THE STONES OF VENICE

“And next to her sate sober Modestie,

Holding her hand upon her gentle hart;

And her against, sate comely Curtesie,

That unto every person knew her part;

And her before was seated overthwart

Soft Silence, and submisse Obedience,

Both linckt together never to dispart.”¹

§ 60. Another notable point in Dante’s system is the intensity of uttermost punishment given to treason, the peculiar sin of Italy, and that to which, at this day, she attributes her own misery with her own lips. An Italian, questioned as to the causes of the failure of the campaign of 1848,² always makes one answer, “We were betrayed;” and the most melancholy feature of the present state of Italy is principally this, that she does not see that, of all causes to which failure might be attributed, this is at once the most disgraceful, and the most hopeless. In fact, Dante seems to me to have written almost prophetically, for the instruction of modern Italy, and chiefly so in the sixth canto of the Purgatorio.

§ 61. Hitherto we have been considering the system of the Inferno only. That of the Purgatorio is much simpler, it being divided into seven districts, in which the souls are severally purified from the sins of Pride, Envy, Wrath, Indifference, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust;³ the poet thus implying in opposition, and describing in various instances, the seven virtues of Humility, Kindness,* Patience, Zeal, Poverty, Abstinence, and Chastity, as adjuncts of the

* Usually called Charity: but this virtue in its full sense is one of the attendant spirits by the Throne; the Kindness here meant is Charity with a special object; or Friendship and Kindness, as opposed to Envy, which has always, in like manner, a special object. Hence the love of Orestes and Pylades is given as an instance of the virtue of Friendship; and the Virgin’s “They have no wine,” at Cana, of general kindness and sympathy with others’ pleasure.

¹ [Faerie Queene, book iv. canto x. 50, 51. At the end of the first stanza a line is omitted, “And darted forth delights the which her goodly graced.”]

² [For another reference to this abortive campaign in the struggle for Italian independence against Austria, see above, p. 10.]

³ [See cantos x.-xxv. The love of Orestes and Pylades is referred to in canto xiii. 29; “They have no wine” (John ii. 3), in xiii. 26.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]