iscovery of a Winged Woman, especially such as she has been described
by her inventor in the story of _Peter Wilkins_; and in point of
treatment, the Mammon and Jealousy of Spenser, some of the monsters
in Dante, particularly his Nimrod, his interchangements of creatures
into one another, and (if I am not presumptuous in anticipating what I
think will be the verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge's
_Christabel_, may rank even with the creations of Shakespeare. It may
be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare had bile and nightmare enough
in him to have thought of such detestable horrors as those of the
interchanging adversaries (now serpent, now man), or even of the huge,
half-blockish enormity of Nimrod,--in Scripture, the 'mighty hunter'
and builder of the tower of Babel,--in Dante, a tower of a man in his
own person, standing with some of his brother giants up to the middle
in a pit in hell, blowing a horn to which a thunderclap is a whisper,
and hallooing after Dante and his guide in the jargon of a lost
tongue! The transformations are too odious to quote: but of the
towering giant we cannot refuse ourselves the 'fearful joy' of a
specimen. It was twilight, Dante tells us, and he and his guide Virgil
were silently pacing through one of the dreariest regions of hell,
when the sound of a tremendous horn made him turn all his attention to
the spot from which it came. He there discovered through the dusk,
what seemed to be the towers of a city. Those are no towers, said his
guide; they are giants, standing up to the middle in one of these
circular pits.

I look'd again; and as the eye makes out,
By little and little, what the mist conceal'd
In which, till clearing up, the sky was steep'd;
So, looming through the gross and darksome air,
As we drew nigh, those mighty bulks grew plain,
And error quitted me, and terror join'd:
For in like manner as all round its height
Montereggione crowns itself with towers,
So tower'd above the circuit of that pit,
Though but half out of it, and half within,
The horrible giants that fought Jove, and still
Are threaten'd when he thunders. As we near'd
The foremost, I discern'd his mighty face,
His shoulders, breast, and more than half his trunk,
With both the arms down hanging by the sides.
His face appear'd to me, in length and breadth,
Huge as St. Peter's pinnacle at Rome,
And of a like proportion all his bo