When I was a child, and read Milton for the first time, his Pandemonium seemed to me a magnificent place. It struck me more than his Paradise, for _that_ was beautiful, but Pandemonium was terrible and beautiful too. The wondrous fabric that “from the earth rose like an exhalation to the sound of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,”—the splendid piles of architecture sweeping line beyond line, “Cornice and frieze with bossy sculptures graven,”—realised a certain picture of Palmyra I had once seen, and which had taken possession of my imagination: then the throne, outshining the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind,—the flood of light streaming from “starry lamps and blazing cressets” quite threw the flames of perdition into the shade. As it was said of Erskine, that he always spoke of Satan with respect, as of a great statesman out of place, a sort of leader of the Opposition; so to me the grand arch-fiend was a hero, like my _then_ favourite Greeks and Romans, a Cymon, a Curtius, a Decius, devoting himself for the good of his country;—such was the moral confusion created in my mind. Pandemonium inspired no horror; on the contrary, my fancy revelled in the artistic beauty of the creation. I felt that I should like to go and see it; so that, in fact, if Milton meant to inspire abhorrence, he has failed, even to the height of his sublimity. Dante has succeeded better. Those who dwell with complacency on the doctrine of eternal punishments must delight in the ferocity and the ingenuity of his grim inventions, worthy of a vengeful theology. Wicked latitudinarians may shudder and shiver at the images called up—grotesque, abominable, hideous—but then Dante himself would sternly rebuke them for making their human sympathies a measure for the judgments of God, and compassion only a veil for treason and rebellion:— “Chi è piu scellerato di colui Ch’ al giudicio divin passion porta?” “Who can show greater wickedness than he Whose passion by the will of God is moved?” However, it must be said in favour of Dante’s Inferno, that no one ever wished to go there.