iles for the diameter of the mouth or crater, and a quarter of a mile
for that of its terminating point. In the middle is the abyss, pervading
the whole depth, and 245 miles in diameter at the opening; which reduces
the different platforms, or territories that surround it, to a size
comparatively small. These territories are more or less varied with land
and water, lakes, precipices, &c. A precipice, fourteen miles high,
divides the first of them from the second. The passages from the upper
world to the entrance are various; and the descents from one circle
to another are effected by the poet and his guide in different
manners-sometimes on foot through by-ways, sometimes by the conveyance
of supernatural beings. The crater he finds to be the abode of those who
have done neither good nor evil, caring for nothing but themselves.
In the first circle are the whole unbaptised world--heathens and
infants--melancholy, though not tormented. Here also is found the
Elysium of Virgil, whose Charon and other infernal beings are among the
agents of torment. In the second circle the torments commence with the
sin of incontinence; and the punishment goes deepening with the crime
from circle to circle, through gluttony, avarice, prodigality, wrath,
sullenness, or unwillingness to be pleased with the creation, disbelief
in God and the soul (with which the punishment by fire commences),
usury, murder, suicide, blasphemy, seduction and other carnal
enormities, adulation, simony, soothsaying, astrology, witchcraft,
trafficking with the public interest, hypocrisy, highway robbery (on
the great Italian scale), sacrilege, evil counsel, disturbance of the
Church, heresy, false apostleship, alchemy, forgery, coining (all these,
from seduction downwards, in one circle); then, in the frozen or lowest
circle of all, treachery; and at the bottom of this is Satan, stuck into
the centre of the earth.

With the centre of the globe commences the antipodean attraction of its
opposite side, together with a rocky ascent out of it, through a
huge ravine. The poet and his guide, on their arrival at this spot,
accordingly find their position reversed; and so conclude their
_downward_ journey _upwards_, till they issue forth to light on the
borders of the sea which contains the island of Purgatory.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL.

Dante says, that when he was half-way on his pilgrimage through this
life, he one day found himself, towards nightfall, in a wood w