Farther, and this is very notable. You might at first think that Dante's divisions were narrow and artificial, in assigning each circle to one sin only, as if every man did not variously commit many. But it is always one sin, the favourite, which destroys souls. That conquered, all others fall with it; that victorious, all others follow with it. Nevertheless, as I told you, the joiner's work, and interwoven walls of Dante's Inferno, marking double forms of sin, and their overlapping, as it were, when they meet, is one of the subtlest conditions traceable in his whole design. Look back to the scheme I gave you in last number. The Minotaur, spirit of lust and anger, rules over the central hell. But the sins of lust and anger, definitely and limitedly described as such, are punished in the upper hell, in the second and fifth circles. Why is this, think you? Have you ever noticed--enough to call it noticing seriously--the expression, "fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind"? There is one lust and one anger of the flesh only; these, all men must feel; rightly feel, if in temperance; wrongly, if in excess; but even then, not necessarily to the destruction of their souls. But there is another lust, and another anger, of the heart; and these are the Furies of Phlegethon--wholly ruinous. Lord of these, on the shattered rocks, lies couched the Infamy of Crete. For when the heart, as well as the flesh, desires what it should not, and the heart, as well as the flesh, consents and kindles to its wrath, the whole man is corrupted, and his heart's blood is fed in its veins from the lake of fire. Take for special example, this sin of usury with which we have ourselves to deal. The punishment in the fourth circle of the upper hell is on Avarice, not Usury. For a man may be utterly avaricious,--greedy of gold--in an instinctive, fleshly way, yet not corrupt his intellect. Many of the most good-natured men are misers: my first shilling in the pill-box and sleepless night did not at all mean that I was an ill-natured or illiberal boy; it did mean, what is true of me still, that I should have great delight in counting money, and laying it in visible heaps and rouleaux. I never part with a new sovereign without a sigh: and if it were not that I am afraid of thieves, I would positively and seriously, at this moment, turn all I have into gold of the newest, and dig a hole for it in my garden, and go and look at it every morning and evening, like the man in Æsop's Fables, or Silas Marner: and where I think thieves will not break through nor steal, I am always laying up for myself treasures upon earth, with the most eager appetite: that bit of gold and diamonds, for instance (IV. 8.), and the most gilded mass-books, and such like, I can get hold of; the acquisition of a Koran, with two hundred leaves richly gilt on both sides, only three weeks since, afforded me real consolation under variously trying circumstances.