which he gives, might have been then considered as sublime at the Florentine court, and would be now, had not Milton far outstretched him in the grandeur and boldness of the vision, and had not some of the features been so grotesque as to be laughable. The first observes Satan standing mid-breast in the icy lake of hell, his black banners before him, and a cloud of night around him. Dante is in stature more like a giant than the giants are his arms!
As he is hideous now, and yet did dare
To scowl upon his Maker———well from him
May all our misery flow———"
He has three faces; one of vermilion, representing anger; one between wan and yellow, representing envy; the third black, representing gloom. Vast wings shoot forth under his shoulders, made, like those of bats, without plumes, yet larger than any sails upon the sea! He flaps them, and three cold winds come forth, freezing Cocytus to its depth. His six eyes weep tears of bloody foam. At every mouth he champs a sinner, bruising them as with ponderous engine. One of these victims, honored as a special mouthful, is Judas Iscariot, the skin of whose back is stripped up occasionally, by way of variety. No dead Judas either, but extremely vital, for we are told that while his head is in the Satanic jaw he plies his feet without! The last view which Dante has, places his lordship upside down to his vision, which position certainly takes nothing from the terrible grotesqueness of the scene!
But as without the rude Mysteries we would have had no Dante, so without Dante we should have had no Miltonic Satan. The seed of one age becomes the blossom and fruit of another; for the black art of the middle ages gave Goethe the seminal idea of his great drama.
The revival of learning found Europe full of legends of devilish tricks with witches, wizards, warlocks, conjurers, magicians, astrologers, and others of that ilk. How men and women walked invisibly, rode in the air on broomsticks, gibbered a universal language, raised winds, disturbed the dead, and tormented the living—are they not
