BEATRICE AND DANTE.--The precise significance of the reproaches which Beatrice pours upon Dante for his mode of life after her death, with the poet’s own bitter shame and intense repentance (xxx., xxxi.), depends upon the view taken of his character and the nature of the wanderings represented in the dark wood. That these aberrations were mainly philosophical and intellectual, as sometimes supposed, appears highly improbable. We would regard Dante’s confession here as one of his most personal utterances, and hold that the cherubically inspired singer of righteousness is deliberately casting aside the allegorical veil which, in the _Convivio_, he had attempted to throw over the things in the past which still severed him from the ideal life when he wrote: “I fear the infamy of having followed such great passion.” It is a personal episode, in which Beatrice is the woman loved and to whose memory the poet has been unfaithful, standing out clearly from the allegorical mystery by which it is surrounded and in which it is set. After Matelda has drawn Dante through Lethe, the four cardinal virtues, which “perfect the intellect and appetite of man according to the capacity of human nature,” lead him to the breast of the mystic Griffin; and, in response to the song of the three theological virtues, which perfect man supernaturally, Beatrice at last unveils her countenance to his gaze: “O splendour of living light eternal.” CONCLUDING ALLEGORIES OF THE “PURGATORIO.”--The allegory is resumed. In the light of this revelation, now that he is purified and free from sin, Dante beholds a vision of the Church and Empire (_Purg._ xxxii.). That glorious procession had first presented an ideal of the Church as Divine Providence intended it to be, before it became the vessel that the serpent of simony broke; the Bride that the Divine Spouse ordained for the guidance of the world. Such being the ideal, Dante beholds in a series of allegorical visions its history, in conjunction with the Empire, from the first coming to Rome down to the transference of the papal chair to Avignon. The great procession moves on through the divine forest, the Griffin still drawing the chariot with Beatrice seated upon it; Matelda with Dante and Statius following after the right wheel. Even as the divine origin of the Church has been seen in the triumphal car, so now the divine origin of the Empire is indicated in the desolate and despoiled tree which they reach. The tree of knowledge of good and evil, since the prohibition to eat of that tree was the beginning of law and the duty of obedience, represents Natural Law or Natural Justice, what Dante calls _ius_; which “in things is nought else than the similitude of the divine will” (_Mon._ ii. 2). The expression of this natural justice and the means for its effectuation in human society is Law, which Dante identifies with the Empire, and thus the tree becomes the symbol of the Empire and of the obedience due to it.