ially of the clergy of those days--He
loved a good story, and he did not hesitate to tell it even when it went
hard against the priests. He knew and he would not hide the corruptions
of the Church, and he was not the man to spare the vices which were
sapping the foundations not so much of the Church as of religion itself.
But his translator is of a different order of men, one of the devout
votaries of falsehood and concealment; and he has done his best to
remove some of the most characteristic touches of Benvenuto's work,
regarding them as unfavorable to the Church, which even now in the
nineteenth century cannot well bear to have exposed the sins committed
by its rulers and its clergy in the thirteenth or fourteenth. Signor
Tamburini has sought the favor of ecclesiastics, and gained the contempt
of such honest men as have the ill-luck to meet with his book. Wherever
Benvenuto uses a phrase or tells an anecdote which can be regarded as
bearing in any way against the Church, we may be sure to find it either
omitted or softened down in this Papalistic version. We give a few
specimens.

In the comment on Canto III. of the "Inferno," Benvenuto says, speaking
of Dante's great enemy, Boniface VIII.,--"Auctor ssepissime dicit
de ipso Bonifacio magna mala, qui de rei veritate fuit magnanimus
peccator": "Our author very often speaks exceedingly ill of Boniface,
who was in very truth a grand sinner." This sentence is omitted in the
translation.

Again, on the well-known verse, (_Inferno,_ xix. 53,) "Se' tu gia costi
ritto, Bonifazio?" Benvenuto commenting says,--"Auctor quando ista
scripsit, viderat pravam vitam Bonifacii, ct ejus mortem rabidam.
Ideo bene judicavit eum damnatum.... Heic dictus Nicolaus improperat
Bonifacio duo mala. Primo, quia Sponsam Christ! fraudulenter assumpsit
de manu simplicis Pastoris. Secundo, quia etiam earn more meretricis
tractavit, simoniacc vendcndo eam, et tyrannice tractando": "The author,
when he wrote these things, had witnessed the evil life of Boniface, and
his raving death. Therefore he well judged him to be damned.... And
here the aforementioned Pope Nicholas charges two crimes upon Boniface:
first, that he had taken the Bride of Christ by deceit from the hand of
a simple-minded Pastor; second, that he had treated her as a harlot,
simoniacally selling her, and tyrannically dealing with her."

These two sentences are omitted by the translator; and the long further
account which Benvenuto