Forgetfulness_; Eunoe, _Well-mindedness_.]

[Footnote 55:

"Senza alcuno scotto
Di pentimento."

Literally, _scot-free_.--"Scotto," scot;--"payment for dinner or supper
in a tavern" (says Rubbi, the Petrarchal rather than Dantesque editor
of the _Parnaso Italiano_, and a very summary gentleman); "here used
figuratively, though it is not a word fit to be employed on serious and
grand occasions" (in cose gravi ed illustri). See his "Dante" in that
collection, vol. ii. p. 297.]

[Footnote 56: The allusion to the childish girl (_pargoletta_) or any
other fleeting vanity,

"O altra vanita con si breve use,"

is not handsome. It was not the fault of the childish girls that he
liked them; and he should not have taunted them, whatever else they
might have been. What answer could they make to the great poet?

Nor does Beatrice make a good figure throughout this scene, whether as
a woman or an allegory. If she is Theology, or Heavenly Grace, &c. the
sternness of the allegory should not have been put into female shape;
and when she is to be taken in her literal sense (as the poet also tells
us she is), her treatment of the poor submissive lover, with leave of
Signor Rubbi, is no better than _snubbing_;--to say nothing of the
vanity with which she pays compliments to her own beauty.

I must, furthermore, beg leave to differ with the poet's thinking it an
exalted symptom on his part to hate every thing he had loved before, out
of supposed compliment the transcendental object of his affections and
his own awakened merits. All the heights of love and wisdom terminate in
charity; and charity, by very reason of its knowing the poorness of so
many things, hates nothing. Besides, it is any thing but handsome or
high-minded to turn round upon objects whom we have helped to lower with
our own gratified passions, and pretend a right to scorn them.]

[Footnote 57:

"Tu asperges me, et mundabor," &c. "Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be
clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."--Psalm li. 7.]

[Footnote 58: Beatrice had been dead ten years.]

III.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. Argument.

The Paradise or Heaven of Dante, in whose time the received system of
astronomy was the Ptolemaic, consists of the Seven successive Planets
according to that system, or the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn; of the Eighth Sphere beyond these, or that of the
Fixed Stars; of the Primum Mobile, or First Mov