houses of Padua and Florence. MALEBOLGE.--A yawning abyss, down which the blood-stained Phlegethon dashes with deafening noise, reaches from the seventh to the eighth circle, Malebolge, the realm of Malice. Lured up by the cord which Dante has girt round him and abandons, Geryon, “unclean image of fraud,” a combination of the mythological monster with the apocalyptic Angel of the bottomless pit, bears Dante and Virgil to the place below. Malebolge is divided into ten valleys, with a gulf in the centre. Since they punish Fraud, _de l’uom proprio male_, “the vice peculiar to man,” the demon tormentors have usually something of the human form (the serpent torturers of the thieves are an exception)--degraded Angels partaking of humanity’s lowest features. Disgusting though many details of this circle may seem to modern taste, they are only terribly realised images of the sins themselves. Panders and seducers (_Inf._ xviii.), flatterers, simoniacs (xix., Pope Nicholas III.), diviners and sorcerers (xx.), barrators or sellers of justice in public offices (xxi. and xxii.), hypocrites (xxiii.), thieves (xxiv. and xxv.), fraudulent counsellors (xxvi. and xxvii.), sowers of scandal and schism (xxviii.), falsifiers of every kind (xxix. and xxx.)--each class occupies one of the ten valleys of Malebolge, and to each is awarded a special form of punishment representing the crime, observing the _contrapasso_ (_Inf._ xxviii. 142), the law of retribution. In the meanwhile the sun has risen in the world above, though this makes no difference in Hell where the sun is silent (_Inf._ xx. 124); it is the morning of Holy Saturday for the Church; the bells have been rung again after the silence of Good Friday, and the _Gloria in excelsis_ sung in anticipation of the morrow’s feast--while Dante is rebuking Pope Nicholas for simony, and hearkening to Guido da Montefeltro’s bitter tale of Pope Boniface’s treachery (_Inf._ xxvii.). There are few nobler utterances of mediaeval Catholicity than that famous outburst of Dantesque indignation in Canto xix., against the unworthy and simoniacal holders of the papal chair, though restrained by the “reverence for the Great Keys.” In one instance only does Dante seem in personal danger, and, curiously enough, it is in the region of the Barrators (_Inf._ xxi. and xxii.), with whose sin his ungrateful countrymen had tried to render him infamous; Virgil himself is almost deceived, that is, Dante’s reason is bewildered and his philosophy at fault; but, although hunted as a criminal, not a drop of the boiling pitch lights upon him, nor do the rakes and hooks of the “Evil-claws” as much as graze his skin. Here and there images from external nature relieve the horror: the country shining white with the hoar-frost before the spring (xxiv. 1-15); the fire-flies gleaming below the hill after the long summer day (xxvi. 25-30). The two cantos depicting the fate of the fraudulent counsellors (xxvi. and xxvii.) seem on a