falcon approaches, and he returns up angry
and defeated.

"Calcabrina, furious at the trick, kept flying after him, desirous that
the sinner might escape, to have a quarrel. And, when the barrator had
disappeared, he turned his talons on his fellow, and was clutched with
him above the ditch. But the other was indeed a sparrowhawk to claw him
well; and both dropt down into the middle of the boiling pond. The heat
at once unclutched them; but rise they could not, their wings were so
beglued. Barbariccia with the rest lamenting, made four of them fly over
to the other coast with all their drags; and most rapidly on this side,
on that, they descended to the stand; they stretched their hooks towards
the limed pair, who were already scalded within the crust; and we left
them thus embroiled." (XXII, 19.)

The grotesque, also, plays a part in the Inferno appearing not only in
the demons taken from classical legend and deformed into caricatures,
but also in the punishment of crimes, v.g. simony and malfeasance in
public office, regarded by our poet as malicious in themselves and
grotesque in their perversity.

Readers who regard the grotesque as a repelling element in the Inferno
may be surprised to learn that Ruskin considers this feature of Dante's
writings an expression of the highest human genius. The great English
critic writes:

"I believe that there is no test of greatness in nations, periods, nor
men more sure than the development, among them or in them of a noble
grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one
kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention or
incapability of understanding it. I think that the central man of all
the world, as representing in perfect balance and imaginative, moral and
intellectual faculties, all at their highest is Dante; and in him the
grotesque reaches at once the most distinct and the most noble
development to which it was ever brought in the human mind. Of the
grotesqueness of our own Shakespeare I need hardly speak, nor of its
intolerableness to his French critics; nor of that of AEschylus and
Homer, as opposed to the lower Greek writers; and so I believe it will
be found, at all periods, in all minds of the first order."

Dante's doctrine of punishment presupposes certain primary truths which
the Church proclaims today as she did in Dante's day. According to the
Florentine's creed, man must answer to God for his moral life because he
h