e style--a style which may be said to write things instead of
words." Hunt's introduction is a fine piece of critical work. His
alert, sparkling, and nimble intellect--somewhat lacking in concentration
and seriousness--but sensitive above all things to the picturesque, was
keenly awake to Dante's poetic greatness. On the other hand, his
cheerful philosophy and tolerant, not to say easy-going moral nature, was
shocked by the Florentine's bitter pride, and by what he conceives to be
his fanaticism, bigotry, superstition, and personal vindictiveness, when

"Hell he peoples with his foes,
Dark scourge of many a guilty line."

Hunt was a Universalist, and Dante was a Catholic Calvinist. There was
a determined optimism about Hunt, and a buoyancy as of a cork or other
light body, sometimes a little exasperating to men of less sanguine
temperament.[22] He ends by protesting that Dante is a semi-barbarian
and his "Divine Comedy" too often an infernal tragedy. "Such a vision as
that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no better than
the dream of an hypochondriacal savage." It was some years before this,
in his lecture on "The Hero as Poet," delivered in 1840, that a friend of
Leigh Hunt, of a temperament quite the opposite of his, had spoken a very
different word touching this cruel scorn--this _saeva indignatio_ of
Dante's. Carlyle, like Hunt, discovered _intensity_ to be the prevailing
character of Dante's genius, emblemed by the pinnacle of the city of Dis;
that "red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom."
Hunt, the Universalist, said of Dante, "when he is sweet-natured once he
is bitter a hundred times." "Infinite pity," says Carlyle, the
Calvinist, "yet also infinite rigour of law, it is so nature is made; it
is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of
his 'Divine Comedy's' being a poor splenetic, impotent terrestrial libel;
putting those into hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! I
suppose if ever pity tender as a mother's was in the heart of any man, it
was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity either.
His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic--sentimentality, or little
better. . . . Morally great above all we must call him; it is the
beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;
as, indeed, what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love?"

It is interesting to note that,