to express the idea of the Deity. They worship nothing in heaven or earth; and no fragments or ruins remain, that could indicate that their fathers knew beyond their descendants." Questions as to any thing a superintending Providence being put to one whose memory was tenacious as his judgment was now enlightened, answered, "We had no idea that an unseen eye saw us, or that an unseen ear heard us. What could we know beyond ourselves, or of another world, before life and immortality were brought to us by the word of God. This declaration was followed by a flood of tears, while he added-you found us beasts, and not men."

After Africaner's mind was irradiated by the revelations of the sacred volume, however, Mr Moffat thus states the remarkable impulse given to his earlier intellect." Often have I seen him under the shadow of a great rock, nearly the live-long day, eagerly perusing the pages of Divine inspiration; or in his hut he would sit unconscious of the affairs of a family around, or the entrance of a stranger, with his eye gazing on the blessed book, and his mind wrapt up in things divine. Many were the nights he sat with me on a great stone, at the door of my habitation, conversing with me till the dawn of another day, on creation, providence, redemption, and the glories of the heavenly world. He did not confine his expanding mind to the volume of revelation, though experience had taught him that it contained heights and depths, and lengths and breadths, which no man comprehends. He was led to look upon the book of nature, and he would regard the heavenly orbs with an inquiring look, cast his eye on the earth beneath his tread, and regarding both as displays of creative power, and intelligence, would inquire about endless space, and infinite duration. I have often been amused," adds Mr Moffat, "when sitting with him, and others who wished to hear his questions answered, and descriptions given of the majesty, extent, and wonders of the works of God, he would at last put his hand on his head, exclaiming, 'I have heard enough; I feel as if my head was too small, and as if it would swell with these great subjects.'"

To return to Dr Kitto.

"Cases," says he, "of persons born deaf obtaining the use of hearing, are exceedingly rare; aud it has very seldom occurred that one who has become thoroughly deaf at any time of life, has recovered the lost sense. The recovery of the blind is much less infrequent. For my own part, many long years have passed since I have abandoned the slightest hope which I might once have entertained, of ever more hearing a sound in this world. I have almost ceased to desire it; excepting on those rare occasions when 1 am enabled to realize a strong perception of the advantages to be found in that kind of society in which I am, from my present position, entitled to mingle, but from which my privation does, in a great measure, exclude me.

Besides, the condition in which three-fourths of life have been passed, has become in some sort natural to me; and I somewhat dread to contemplate the change of habits which restored hearing would necessitate or produce, and the new responsibilities which it would im pose. I fear that I should run wild under the influence of so great a change; and that I should be no longer able to maintain the sedentary life which I have hitherto led, or keep up the habits of close application and incessant study, in which I have been enabled to find many sources of satisfaction and the means of some usefulness. Upon the whole, therefore. I am well content in the prospect of spending my remaining years in silence. Still, if I knew that any operation or application would awaken the aural nerve from its long rest, and restore the lost sense to me, I should probably think it

my duty to risk the consequences of that great joy at which I tremble-not because I value it not, or because I do not appreciate it, but because I rate it so highly as to fear that the mind might be overwhelmed, and established habits broken up, by the mighty influx of new sensations, new ideas, and new hopes."

Several cases of the spontaneous recovery of hearing are on record; one of the most ancient is that of the son of Crasus, as related by Herodotus.

"Croesus had a son, who although in other respects not deficient, was dumb. During his prosperity, the father had used for his relief, every means in his power, and among other things bethought him of sending to consult the oracle at Delphi. To his inquiries the Pythian thus replied :

O man unwise, of Lydia's realms the king,
Wish not his voice within thy halls to ring;
Better for thee that pleasure to forego:-

The day he speaks shall be a day of woe.'

When the fortifications [of Sardis, his capital city] were taken, a Persian, not knowing Croesus, was about to kill him; and he, seeing himself invaded, and not car ing to survive his misfortunes, would have met the stroke of death. But his speechless son, seeing the Persian approach, moved with fear and agony, cried out→→ 'Man, kill not Croesus!' These were his first words, and from that time forward he continued to speak.

Larcher and others argue that the son of Croesus had been speechless only, and not deaf and dumb. Most certainly, his dumbness only is mentioned in any of the recorded circumstances, and in the application to and response from the oracle. Another response of the same oracle on a different occasion, contains a line which appears to allude to the same youth

"I understand the dumb; and I hear him who speaketh not." The proof does not, however, appear to me very conclusive. As dumbness is generally the effect of want of hearing, and is more conspicuous than the primary and greater privation, it is usually taken to represent both conditions; and if we say that a man is dumb, we are understood to mean that he is both deaf and dumb. Thus our usage would go for nothing, were the case not justly the same in the use of the Greek word xapós. In the Gospel of St Mark, the deafness of the deaf and dumb men whom Christ cured is expressed by this very word (Mark vii. 32, 37; ix. 25); while in the parallel passages in other Gospels, the same men are described simply as 'dumb:' and in all those places their dumbness is expressed by this same word xapis, which des cribes their deafness in these cited texts in which they are said to have been both deaf and dumb. On these grounds we incline to think that the son of Croesus was both deaf and dumb; and the rather, as no difficulty is removed by supposing him only speechless.

Before leaving this subject we may be permitted to say that in this age of benevolence and wide extended charities, few circumstances have struck us more than the niggardly allowances which are made to deaf and dumb, and we may add blind, institutions. We know many cases of people so deprived, which remain unrelieved simply from a deficiency of funds, perhaps of a few hundred pounds a-year. Let but benevolent persons, who have the means, make one visit to such places, and the delightful spectacle which they will there see of human beings, often of the most intellectual and interesting class, snatched from utter solitude and the misery of ignorance, and placed in cheerful correspondence with their fellow-beings, cannot but stimulate them to contribute to such a purpose.

musician, whom he greets with so much tenderness in the World of Shades. Nor were his duties as a citizen forgotten. The year before Beatrice's death he was at the battle of Campaldine, which his countrymen gained against the people of Arezza, and the year after it he was present at the taking of Caprona from the Pisans. Report also states that he began the study of medicine, as also that he became for a short time, an inmate of a Franciscan monastery. At the age of twenty-six he married; but full as he is in the praises of his lost Beatrice, he never utters the name of her who became his wife. Gemma Donati was a kinswoman of the powerful family of that name. It seems not improbable, from some passages in his works, that she was the young lady whom he speaks of as taking pity on him on account of his passion for Beatrice; and in common justice to his feelings, as a man and a gentleman, it is surely to be concluded that he felt some sort of passion for his bride, if not of a very spiritual sort, though he afterwards did 'not scruple to intimate that he was ashamed of it, and Beatrice is made to rebuke him in the other world for thinking of anybody after herself. It was not a happy union,-nothing is known to the disadvantage of the wife,--but two years after his marriage, Dante wrote 'an adoring account of his first love, and called one of his daughters Beatrice, in honour, it is understood, of the fair Portinari, which was either a great compliment, or no mean trial to the temper of the mother.

Italy, in those days, was divided into the parties of Guelphs and Ghibellines; the former, the advocates of general church-ascendancy and local government; the latter, of the pretensions of the Emperor of Germany, who claimed to be the Roman Cæsar, and paramount over the Pope. In Florence, the Guelphs had for a long time been so triumphant as to keep the Ghibellines in a state of banishment. Dante was born and bred a Guelph; he had twice borne arms for his country against Ghibelline neighbours; and now, at the age of thirtyfive, in the ninth of his marriage, and last of his residence with his wife, he was appointed chief of the temporary administrators of affairs, called Priors;-functionaries who held office only for two months.

Unfortunately, at that moment his party had become subdivided into the factions of the Whites and Blacks, or adherents of two different sides in a dispute that took place in Pistoia. The consequences becoming serious, the Blacks proposed to bring in, as mediator, the French Prince, Charles of Valois, then in arms for the Pope against the Emperor; but the Whites, of whom Dante 'was one, were hostile to the measure; and in order to prevent it, he and his brother magistrates expelled for a time the heads of both factions, to the satisfaction of neither. The Whites accused them of secretly leaning to the Ghibellines, and the Blacks of openly favouring the Whites; who being, indeed, allowed to come back before their time, on the alleged ground of the unwholesomeness of their exile, which was fatal to Dante's friend Cavalcante, gave a colour to the charge. Dante answered it by saying, that he had then quitted office; but he could not show that he had lost his influence. Meantime, Charles was still urged to interfere, and Dante was sent ambassador to the Pope to obtain his disapprobation of the interference; but the Pope (Boniface the Eighth), who had probably discovered that the Whites had ceased to care for any thing but their own disputes, and who, at all events, did not like their objection to his representative, beguiled the ambassador, and encouraged the French prince; the Blacks, in consequence, regained their ascendancy; and the luckless poet, during his absence, was denounced as a corrupt

administrator of affairs, guilty of peculation; was severely muleted; banished from Tuscany for two years; and subsequently, for contumaciousness, was sentenced to be burnt alive, in case he returned ever. He never did return.

From that day forth, Dante never beheld again his home or his wife. Hér relations obtained possession of power, but no use was made of it, except to keep him in exile. He had not accorded with them; and perhaps half the secret of his conjugal discomfort was owing to politics. It is the opinion of some, that the married couple were not sorry to part; others think that the wife remained behind, solely to scrape together what property she could, and bring up the children. All that is known is, that she never lived with him more.

Dante now certainly did what his enemies had accused him of wishing to do: he joined the old exiles whom he had helped to make such, the party of the Ghibellines. He alleges, that he never was really of any party but his own; a naïve confession, probably true in one sense, considering his scorn of other people, his great intelleetual superiority, and the large views he had for the whole Italian people. And, indeed, he soon quarrelled in private with the individuals composing his new party, however stanch he apparently remained to their cause. His former associates he had learned to hate for their differences with him, and for their self-seeking; he hated the Pope for deceiving him; he hated the Pope's French allies for being his allies, and interfering with Florence; and he had come to love the Emperor for being hated by them all, and for holding out (as he fancied) the only chance of reuniting Italy to their confusion, and making her the restorer of himself, and the mistress of the world.

With these feelings in his heart, no money in his purse, and no place in which to lay his head, except such as chance patrons afforded him, he now began to wander over Italy, like some lonely lion of a man,

grudging in his great disdain.' At one moment he was conspiring and hoping; at another, despairing and endeavouring to conciliate his beautiful Florence: now again catching hope from some new movement of the Emperor's; and then, not very handsomely threatening and re-abusing her; but always pondering and grieving, or trying to appease his thoughts with some composition, chiefly of his great work. It is conjectured, that whenever anything particularly affected him, whether with joy or sorrow, he put it, hot with the impression, into his sacred poem.' Every body who jarred against his sense of right or his prejudices he sent to the infernal regions, friend or foe: the strangest people who sided with them (but certainly no personal foe) he exalted to heaven. He encouraged, if not personally assisted, two ineffectual attempts of the Ghibellines against Florence; wrote, besides his great work, a book of mixed prose and poetry on Love and Virtue;' a Latin treatise on Monarchy, recommending the divine right' of the Emperor; another in two parts, and in the same language, on the Vernacular Tongue; and learns to know meanwhile, as he affectingly tells us, how hard it was to climb other people's stairs, and how salt the taste of bread is that is not our own.' It is even thought not improbable, from one awful passage of his poem, that he may have placed himself in some public way,' and, stripping his visage of all shame, and trembling in his very vitals,' have 'stretched out his hand for charity'an image of suffering which, proud as he was, yet considering how great a man, is almost enough to make one's common nature stoop down for pardon at his feet; and yet he should first prostrate himself at the feet of that nature for his outrages on God and man.

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Several of the princes and feudal chieftains of Italy entertained the poet for a while in their houses; but genius and worldly power, unless for worldly purposes, find it difficult to accord, especially in tempers like his. There must be great wisdom and amiableness on both

sides to save them from jealousy of one another's pretensions. Dante was not the man to give and take in such matters on equal terms; and hence he is at one time in a palace, and at another in a solitude. Now he is in Sienna, now in Arezzo-now in Bologna-in Padua-in Paris-some say in Germany, and at Oxford, in England.

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It was probably in the middle period of his exile, that in one of the moments of his greatest longing for his native country, he wrote that affecting passage in the Convito, which was evidently a direct effort at conciliation. Excusing himself for some harshness and obscurity in the style of that work, he exclaims, ⚫ Ah! would it had pleased the Dispenser of all things that this excuse had never been needed; that neither others had done me wrong, nor myself undergone penalty undeservedly-the penalty, I say, of exile and of poverty. For it pleased the citizens of the fairest and most renowned daughter of Rome-Florence-to cast me out of her most sweet bosom, where I was born, and bred, and passed half the life of man, and in which, with her good leave, I still desire with all my heart, to repose my weary spirit, and finish the days allotted me; and so I have wandered in almost every place to which our language extends, a stranger, almost a beggar, exposing against my will the wounds given me by fortune, too often unjustly imputed to the sufferer's fault. Truly, I have been a vessel without sail and without rudder, driven about upon different ports and shores by the dry wind that springs out of dolorous poverty; and hence have I appeared vile in the eyes of many, who, perhaps, by some better report had conceived of me a different impression, and in whose sight not only has my person become thus debased, but an unworthy opinion created of every thing which I did, or which I had to do.

Some time before his death he received permission to return to Florence, bnt on conditions which he justly refused and resented in the following noble letter to a kinsman.

From your letter, which I received with due respect and affection, I observe how much you have at heart my restoration to my country. I am bound to you the more gratefully, inasmuch as an exile rarely finds a friend. But after mature consideration, I must, by my answer, disappoint the wishes of some little minds; and I confide in the judgment to which your impartiality and prudence will lead you. Your nephew and mine has written to me, what indeed had been mentioned by many other friends, that, by a decree concerning the exiles, I am allowed to return to Florence, provided I pay a certain sum of money, and submit to the humiliation of asking and receiving absolution; wherein, my father, I see two propositions that are ridiculous and impertinent. I speak of the impertinence of those who mention such conditions to me; for in your letter, dictated by judgment and discretion, there is no such thing. Is such an invitation, then, to return to his country glorious to Dante Alighieri after suffering in exile almost fifteen years? Is it thus they would recompense innocence which all the world knows, and the labour and fatigue of unremitting study? Far from the man who is familiar with philosophy be the senseless baseness of a heart of earth, that could act like a little sciolist, and imitate the infamy of some others, by offering himself up as it were in chains: far from the man who cries aloud for justice, this compromise by his money with his persecutors. No, my father, this is not the way that shall lead me back to my country. I will return with hasty steps, if you or any other can open to me a way that shall not derogate from the fame and honour of Dante; but if by no such way Florence can be entered, then Florence I shall never enter. What! shall I not everywhere enjoy the light of the sun and stars? and may I not seek and contemplate, in every

corner of the earth, under the canopy of heaven, consoling and delightful truth, without first rendering myself inglorious, nay infamous, to the people and republic of Florence. Bread, I hope, will not fail me.'

Had Dante's pride and indignation always vented themselves in this truly exalted manner, never could the admirers of his genius have refused him their sympathy; and never, I conceive, need he either have brought his exile upon him, or closed it as he did. To that close we have now come, and it is truly melancholy and mortifying. Failure in a negotiation with the Venetians for his patron, Guido Novello, is supposed to have been the last bitter drop which made the cup of his endurance run over. He returned from Venice to Ravenna worn out, and there died, after fifteen years' absence from his country, in the year 1231, aged fifty-seven. His life had been so agitated, that it probably would not have lasted so long, but for the solace of his poetry, and the glory which he knew it must produce him. Guido gave him a sumptuous funeral, and intended to give him a monument; but such was the state of Italy in those times. that he himself died in exile the year after. The monument, however, and one of a nobler sort, was subsequently bestowed by the father of Cardinal Bembo, in 1483; and another, still nobler, as late as 1780, by Cardinal Gonzago. His countrymen, in after years, made two solemn applications for the removal of his dust to Florence; but the just pride of the Ravennese refused them.

Of the exile's family, three sons died young; the daughter went into a nunnery; and the two remaining brothers, who ultimately joined their father in his banishment, became respectable men of letters, and left families in Ravenna; where the race, though extinct in the male line, still survives through a daughter, in the noble house of Serego Alighieri. No direct descent of the other kind from poets of former times is, I believe, known to exist.

The manners and general appearance of Dante have been minutely recorded, and are in striking agreement with his character. Boccaccio and other novelists are the chief relaters; and their accounts will be received accordingly with the greater or less trust, as the reader considers them probable; but the author of the Decameron personally knew some of his friends and relations, and he intermingles his least favourable reports with expressions of undoubted reverence. The poet was of middle height, of slow and serious deportment, had a long dark visage, large piercing eyes, large jaws, an aquiline nose, a projecting under-lip, and thick curling hair-a swarthy aspect announcing determination and melancholy. There is a sketch of his countenance, in his younger days, from the immature but sweet pencil of Giotto; and it is a refreshment to look at it, though pride and discontent, I think, are discernible in its lineaments. It is idle, and no true compliment to his nature, to pretend, as his mere worshippers do, that his face owes all its subsequent gloom and exacerbation to external causes, and that he was in every respect the poor victim of events-the infant changed at nurse by the wicked. What came out of him, he must have had in him, at least in the germ; an inconsistent nature, where the sweet and bitter, the thoughtful and outrageous co-existed. He dressed with a becoming gravity, was temperate in his diet, a great student, seldom spoke, unless spoken to, but always to the purpose, and almost all the anecdotes recorded of him, except by himself, are full of pride and sarcasm. He was evidently a passionate lover of painting and music,-his conduct towards the fair sex less platonic than his poetry expresses or morality sanctions, could be very social when young, and though his poetry was of a grave and weighty cast, the minuteness of a biographer informs us that his hand-writing was neat and precise. Of his irascible temper, Boccaccio says, that he would get into such passions with the very boys and girls in the street, who plagued him with party

words, as to throw stones at them,-a thing that would be incredible, if persons acquainted with his great but ultra-sensitive nature did not know what Italians could do in all ages, from Dante's age down to the times of Alfieri and Foscolo. Pride, scorn, and revenge, were his great faults; his Christianity, at least as shown in his poem, was not that of Christ, but of a furious polemic. We learn from Boccaccio, that when he was asked to go ambassador from his party to the Pope, he put to them the following useless and mortifying queries: If I go, who is to stay? And if I stay, who is to go?' Neither did his pride make him tolerant of pride in others. A neighbour applying for his intercession with a magistrate, who had summoned him for some offence, Dante, who disliked the man for riding in an overbearing manner along the streets, (stretching out his legs as wide as he could, and hindering people from going by,) did intercede with the magistrate, but it was in behalf of doubling the fine in consideration of the horsemanship. The neighbour, who was a man of family, was so exasperated, that Sacchetti the novelist says it was the principal cause of Dante's expatriation. This will be considered the less improbable, if, as some suppose, the delinquent obtained possession of his derider's confiscated property; but, at all events, nothing is more likely to have injured him. The bitterest animosities are generally of a personal nature; and bitter indeed must have been those which condemned a man of official dignity and of genius to such a penalty as the stake.

The poem on which rests his fame, but which he did not live to publish in any formal manner, he called "The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by nation not by habits." He called this, the saddest poem in the world, a comedy, because it was written in a middle style, the epithet divine was added afterwards by some transcriber.

This poem is partly a system of theology, partly an abstract of the knowledge of the day, but chiefly a series of passionate and imaginative pictures, altogether forming an account of the author's times, his friends, his enemies, and himself, written to vent the spleen of his exile, and the rest of his feelings, good and bad, and to reform church and state by a spirit of resentment and obloquy, which highly needed reform itself. It has also a design strictly self-referential. The author feigns, that the beatified spirit of his mistress has obtained leave to warn and purify his soul, by showing him the state of things in the next world. She deputes the soul of his master Virgil to conduct him through hell and purgatory, and then takes him herself through the spheres of heaven, where Saint Peter catechises and confirms him, and where he is finally honoured with sights of the Virgin Mary, of Christ, and even a glimpse of the Supreme Being!

The boundaries of the old and new theology were so confused in Dante's time, and such was the reverence for the Latin poets, that there is a continual mixture of Pagan deities with the religious belief of the times. Throughout the poem, his own spleen, hatred, and avowed sentiments of vengeance are manifest. It is a poem to excite wonder and shuddering awe,-not admiration or delight, and thus it has been viewed by the great minds of after ages. Chaucer evidently thought him a man who would spare no unnecessary probe to the feelings. Spenser says not a word of him, though he copied Tasso, and eulogised Ariosto. Shakspere would assuredly have sent him into the list of those presumptuous lookers into eternity who "take upon themselves to know."

Milton calls him "that sad Florentine," a lamenting epithet by which we do not designate a man whom we desire to resemble. Warton, admirably applying to him a passage out of Milton, says, that "Hell grows darker at his frown." Walter Scott could not read him, at least not with pleasure, as the plan, says he, is unhappy, the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting." As a specimen of the present prose translation, we subjoin the opening of the Journey through Hell.

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Dante says, that when he was half-way on his pilgrimage through this life, he one day found himself, towards nightfall, in a wood where he could no longer discern the right path. It was a place so gloomy and terrible, every thing in it growing in such a strange and savage manner, that the horror he felt returned on him whenever he thought of it. The pass of death could hardly be more bitter. Travelling through it all night with a beating heart, he at length came to the foot of a hill, and looking up, as he began to ascend it, he perceived the shoulders of the hill clad in the beams of morning; a sight which gave him some little comfort. He felt like a man who has buffeted his way to land out of a shipwreck, and who, though still anxious to get farther from his peril, cannot help turning round to gaze on the wide waters. So did he stand looking back on the pass that contained that dreadful wood.

After resting a while, he again betook him up the hill; but had not gone far when he beheld a leopard bounding in front of him, and hindering his progress. After the leopard came a lion, with his head aloft, mad with hunger, and seeming to frighten the very air; and after the lion, more eager still, a she-wolf, so lean that she appeared to be sharpened with every wolfish want. The pilgrim fled back in terror to the wood, where he again found himself in a darkness to which the light never penetrated. In that place, he said, the sun never spoke word. But the wolf was still close upon him.

While thus flying, he beheld coming towards him a man, who spoke something, but he knew not what. The voice sounded strange and feeble, as if from disuse. Dante loudly called out to him to save him, whether he was a man, or only a spirit. The apparition, at whose sight the wild beasts disappeared, said that he was no longer man, though man he had been in the time of the false gods, and sung the history of the offspring of Anchises.

And art thou, then, that Virgil,' said Dante, who has filled the world with such floods of eloquence? O glory and light of all poets, thou art my master, and thou mine author; thou alone the book from which I have gathered beauties that have gained me praise. Behold the peril I am in, and help me, for I tremble in every vein and pulse.'

Virgil comforted Dante. He told him that he must quit the wood by another road, and that he himself would be his guide, leading him first to behold the regions of woe underground, and then the spirits that lived content in fire, because it purified them for heaven; and then that he would consign him to other hands worthier than his own, which should raise him to behold heaven itself; for as the Pagans, of whom he was one, had been rebels to the law of him that reigns there, nobody could arrive at Paradise by their means.

So saying, Virgil moved on his way, and Dante closely followed. He expressed a fear, however, as they went, lest being neither Æneas nor St Paul,' his journey could not be worthily undertaken, nor end in wisdom. But Virgil, after sharply rebuking him for his faintheartedness, told him that the spirit of her whom he loved, Beatrice, had come down from heaven on purpose to commend her lover to his care; upon which the drooping courage of the pilgrim was raised to an undaunted confidence, as flowers that have been closed and bowed down by frosty nights rise all up on their stems in the morning. "Through me is the road to the dolorous city; Through me is the road to the everlasting sorrows; Through me is the road to the lost people.

Justice was the motive of my exalted maker;

I was made by divine power, by consummate wisdom, and by primal love;

Before me was no created thing, if not eternal; and eternal am I also. Abandon hope, all ye who enter."

Such were the words which Dante beheld written in dark characters over a portal.