different plane from the rest; the sense of increasing degradation in the passage downwards through Malebolge is checked; the story of the last voyage of Ulysses with its spiritual nobility and imaginative splendour, the whole episode of Guido da Montefeltro with its dramatic intensity, are among the greatest creations of poetry. But so repulsive is much of the matter of Malebolge that Dante represents his own moral sense as becoming clouded; in the last valley he listens without disgust, almost with pleasure, to an unsavoury quarrel between the Greek Sinon and the coiner Adam of Brescia (_Inf._ xxx.), until a sharp rebuke from Virgil restores him to himself: _Chè voler ciò udire è bassa voglia_, “for to wish to hear that is a base desire.” NINTH CIRCLE.--In the centre of Malebolge yawns a huge chasm, like an immense well, where the precipice falls to the ninth and last circle. Like towers round the margin of this pit appear the upper parts of captive Giants, both of Scripture and mythology; Nimrod, Ephialtes, Briareus--the Paladins of the Emperor of Hell defending the last and most secret chamber of his palace. The Giants connect this last circle with Pride (_Purg._ xii. 28-36), as the mention of Cain does with Envy (_Purg._ xiv. 133), and Lucifer himself with both Pride and Envy (_Inf._ vii. 12; _Purg._ xii. 25; _Par._ ix. 129, xix. 46, etc.). Treachery is a gigantic version of fraud, by which “is forgotten that love which nature makes, and also that which afterwards is added, giving birth to special trust” (_Inf._ xi. 61-63); hence the guardians of this circle are monstrosities in magnified human shape. Antaeus (_Inf._ xxxi.), less guilty, and therefore less fettered than the others, hands Virgil and Dante down into this last circle, where the traitors are eternally consumed in the river Cocytus, which is frozen to a vast dark lake of ice, sloping down to Lucifer. Nowhere else is Dante so utterly pitiless. Hardly can we recognise the man who had fainted with pity at the story of Francesca (_Inf._ v. 141) in the ruthless inquisitor, who is ready to add to the torture of Bocca degli Abati (_inf._ xxxii. 97), but will not stretch out his hand to afford a moment’s alleviation to Frate Alberigo de’ Manfredi (_Inf._ xxxiii. 149).