In works of pure imagination we trace the same march of the human intellect; and we discover in those inventions, which appear sealed by their originality, how much has been derived from the age and the people in which they were produced. Every work of genius is tinctured by the feelings, and often originates in the events, of the times. The _Inferno_ of DANTE was caught from the popular superstitions of the age, and had been preceded by the gross visions which the monks had forged, usually for their own purposes. "La Citta dolente," and "la perduta gente," were familiar to the imaginations of the people, by the monkish visions, and it seems even by ocular illusions of Hell, exhibited in Mysteries, with its gulfs of flame, and its mountains of ice, and the shrieks of the condemned.[A] To produce the "Inferno" only required the giant step of genius, in the sombre, the awful, and the fierce, DANTE. When the age of chivalry flourished, all breathed of love and courtesy; the great man was the great lover, and the great author the romancer. It was from his own age that MILTON derived his greatest blemish--the introduction of school-divinity into poetry. In a polemical age the poet, as well as the sovereign, reflected the reigning tastes. [Footnote A: Sismondi relates that the bed of the river Arno, at Florence, was transformed into a representation of the Gulf of Hell, in the year 1304; and that all the variety of suffering that monkish imagination had invented was apparently inflicted on real persons, whose shrieks and groans gave fearful reality to the appalling scene.--ED.]