VIRGIL AND BEATRICE.--The end of the poem, as the Epistle to Can Grande shows, is to remove those living in this life from the state of misery, and lead them to the state of felicity. In the individual, this will be accomplished by opening his eyes to the nature of vice; by inducing him to contrition, confession, satisfaction; by leading him to contemplation of eternal Truth. In the universality, it can only be effected by the restoration of the Empire and the purification of the Church. The dual scheme of the _Monarchia_ reappears in the _Commedia_, but transferred from the sphere of Church and State to the field of the individual soul. In the allegorical sense, Virgil may be taken to represent Human Philosophy based on Reason; Beatrice to symbolize Divine Philosophy, which includes the sacred science of Theology, and is in possession of Revelation. But, primarily, Virgil and Beatrice (like the other souls in the poem) are living personalities, not allegorical types. Allegory may be forgotten in the tender relation between Dante and Virgil, and, when that “sweetest father” leaves his disciple in the Earthly Paradise to return to his own sad place in Limbo, there is little of it left in Beatrice’s rebuke of her lover’s past disloyalty; none when she is last seen enshrined in glory beneath the Blessed Virgin’s throne. There is then a universal and a personal meaning to be distinguished, as well as the literal and allegorical significations. The _Divina Commedia_ is the tribute of devotion from one poet to another; it is the sequel to a real love, the glorification of the image of a woman loved in youth; the story of one man’s conversion and spiritual experience. Nor can we doubt that the study of the imperial poet of _alma Roma_ helped Dante to his great political conception of the destiny of the Empire, even as Philosophy first lifted him from the moral aberrations that severed him from the ideal life (_Purg._ xxiii. 118). But, at the same time, Dante represents all mankind; as Witte remarks, “the poet stands as the type of the whole race of fallen man, called to salvation.”