More reprehensible from the point of view of good taste is the Poet’s eager attention attracted to the vulgar harlequinade between Master Adam the false-coiner and the Greek Sinon, where the latter strikes the former on his “inflated paunch” till it resounds— Come fosse un tamburo.[121] But Dante is careful to put things right in the sequel, and makes his own blush of shame respond at once to Virgil’s chiding— ... Or pur mira Ch’ è per poco che teco non mi risso![122] Less broad in its grim playfulness is the taunt which the spendthrift Jacomo da Sant’ Andrea, hunted and breathless, gasps out at his fellow-sufferer: “Lano, at Toppo’s jousts thy legs were not so nimble”— Lano, sì non furo accorte Le gambe tue a le giostre dal Toppo![123] Exquisite in the irony of its situation is in _Inf._ xix, in which Dante, in order to find a place for solemn invective against Boniface VIII,[124] and to assign him, while still alive, his place in Hell, makes Nicholas III mistake the Poet’s voice for that of the Pontiff, and exclaim— Se’ tu già costì ritto, Se’ tu già costì ritto, Bonifazio? Whereat Dante represents himself as quite non-plussed and unable to grasp the speaker’s meaning! Nor is the scene itself without a picturesque absurdity that evinces a subtle sense of humour, especially when we remember the over-weening pretensions of Boniface to unearthly dignity. The flaming legs of Simonists kicking to and fro above the surface of the ground wherein the rest of them is buried headforemost; and the neat epigram in which Pope Nicholas describes his plight— Su l’ avere, e qui me misi in borsa— “I pursed wealth above, and here—myself.”[125] Bearing in mind the Poet’s solemn and deliberate purpose, as we conceive it, to pour scathing ridicule upon that which qualifies man for a place in Hell, we may fairly aver that even in the most critical scenes and episodes he does not transgress the canons of the Master whom he revered. If there is βωμολοχία—unseemly and unrestrained jesting—in his Inferno, it is not Dante’s, but the Demons’. Dante, as we have seen, deliberately dissociates himself from it; and the absence of all such extravagance from his description of Paradise and even of Purgatory confirms our inference that the humorous element, even at its grimmest and coarsest, is carefully proportioned to the environment with which he is dealing. The _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_ are marked (like the scene with Nicholas III) by occasional outbursts of political or quasi-political invective, seasoned with stinging satire. In these tirades against Florence or the Papacy Dante is sometimes his own spokesman; sometimes they are put into another mouth.