And as there is infinite variety of guilt and woe, so is there infinite variety of character in Dante's Hell. Though the poet condemns with sternest impartiality all who have died in unrepented sin, yet he recognises and honours the moral distinctions amongst them. What a difference, for instance, between the wild blaspheming robber Vanni Fucci,[38] and the defiant Capaneus,[39] a prototype of Milton's Satan, the one incited by the bestial rage of reckless self-abandonment, the other by the proud self-reliance of a spirit that eternity cannot break--alike in their defiance of the Almighty, but how widely severed in the sources whence it springs. Look again where Jason strides. The wrongs he did Medea and Hypsipyle have condemned him to the fierce lash under which his base companions shriek and fly; but he, still kingly in his mien, without a tear or cry bears his eternal pain.[40] See Farinata, the great Florentine--in his ever burning tomb he stands erect and proud, 'as holding Hell in great disdain;' tortured less by the flames than by the thought that the faction he opposed is now triumphant in his city; proud, even in Hell, to remember how once he stood alone between his country and destruction.[41] See again where Pietro delle Vigne, in the ghastly forest of suicides, longs with a passionate longing that his fidelity at that time when he 'held both the keys of the great Frederick's heart' should be vindicated upon earth from the unjust calumnies that drove him to self-slaughter.[42] And see where statesmen and soldiers of Florence, themselves condemned for foul and unrepented sin, still love the city in which they lived, still long to hear some good of her. As the flakes of fire fall 'like snow upon a windless day' on their defenceless bodies, see with what dismay they gaze into one another's eyes when Dante brings ill news to them of Florence.[43] In a word, the souls in Hell are what they were on earth, no better and no worse. This is the key-note to the comprehension of the poem. No change has taken place; none are made rebels to God's will, and none are brought into submission to it, by their punishment; but all are as they were. Even amongst the vilest there is only the rejection of a thin disguise, no real increase of shamelessness. Many souls desire to escape notice and to conceal their crimes, just as they would have done on earth; many condemn their evil deeds and are ashamed of them, just as they would have been on earth; but there is no change of character, no infusion of a new spirit either for good or ill; with all their variety and complexity of character, the unrepentant sinners wake in Hell as they would wake on earth our mingled pity and horror, our mingled loathing and admiration. Man as misusing his free will, in all the scope and variety of the infinite theme, is the subject of the poem.