[Footnote 33: So, at least, I conceive, by what appears afterwards; and
I may here add, once for all, that I have supplied the similar requisite
intimations at each successive step in Purgatory, the poet seemingly
having forgotten to do so. It is necessary to what he implied in the
outset. The whole poem, it is to be remembered, is thought to have
wanted his final revision.]

[Footnote 34: What an instance to put among those of haste to do good!
But the fame and accomplishments of Caesar, and his being at the head of
our Ghibelline's beloved emperors, fairly overwhelmed Dante's boasted
impartiality.]

[Footnote 35: A masterly allegory of Worldly Pleasure. But the close of
it in the original has an intensity of the revolting, which outrages the
last recesses of feeling, and disgusts us with the denouncer.]

[Footnote 36: The fierce Hugh Capet, soliloquising about the Virgin in
the tones of a lady in child-bed, is rather too ludicrous an association
of ideas. It was for calling this prince the son of a butcher, that
Francis the First prohibited the admission of Dante's poem into his
dominions. Mr. Cary thinks the king might have been mistaken in his
interpretation of the passage, and that "butcher" may be simply a
metaphorical term for the blood-thirstiness of Capet's father. But when
we find the man called, not _the_ butcher, or _that_ butcher, or butcher
in reference to his species, but in plain local parlance "a butcher of
Paris" (_un beccaio di Parigi_), and when this designation is followed
up by the allusion to the extinction of the previous dynasty, the
ordinary construction of the words appears indisputable. Dante seems
to have had no ground for what his aristocratical pride doubtless
considered a hard blow, and what King Francis, indeed, condescended to
feel as such. He met with the notion somewhere, and chose to believe it,
in order to vex the French and their princes. The spirit of the taunt
contradicts his own theories elsewhere; for he has repeatedly said, that
the only true nobility is in the mind. But his writings (poetical truth
excepted) are a heap of contradictions.]

[Footnote 37: Mr. Cary thought he had seen an old romance in which there
is a combat of this kind between Jesus and his betrayer. I have an
impression to the same effect.]

[Footnote 38:

"O Signor mio, quando saro io lieto
A veder la vendetta the nascosa
Fa dolce l'ira tua nel tuo segreto!"

The spirit of the blasphemous