[8] The Adriatic. [9] Compare with what is said in Chapter 1. [10] One of the divisions of the last circle, where traitors are punished. [11] Dis--the emperor of the infernal regions, according to the ancients. [12] Fiesole is a town on a high hill near Florence--the latter was said to have been settled by the people of Fiesole. [13] Two islands in the Mediterranean near the mouth of the Arno. [14] The sun's. [15] Symbol of active life, as Rachel is of contemplative life. [16] Forest near Ravenna. [17] The Empyrean. [18] Carducci says Dante is a "most great poet because he is a great man, and a great man because he had a great conscience." CHAPTER IV PETRARCH It is hard for people to-day to realize the enormous difference between the medieval and modern world. The former was full of superstition and naïve belief; authority reigned supreme; in religion no one dreamed of questioning the decrees of church and pope; in philosophy a question was settled by a quotation from Aristotle or his scholastic representative, St. Thomas Aquinas. This same blind following of authority was exemplified in art--painters imitated slavishly their predecessors, and up to the appearance of Cimabue and Giotto no one dreamed of improving on the stiff conventionalities of the Byzantine artists. In scholarship, criticism--_i. e._, individual judgment--was unknown; in science, all such old-world fables as the mandragora, dragons, phenix, and unicorn were devoutly received as true zoölogy, while the Ptolemaic system of astronomy was unquestioned. The idea of progress was utterly unknown; the world had been created exactly as it was, and would remain so till the coming of Christ, when a new heaven and a new earth would be formed. So, in the political and social world, the thought that the existing state of things could change would have seemed absurd. It needs no words of mine to demonstrate the vast difference between these conceptions and the present world, with its idea of illimitable progress, its criticism of all things high and low, its denial that authority in church and state is just, simply because it is old; its eager acceptation of all innovations; its cultivation of the individual in all departments of life; to say nothing of the vast field opened up by the discoveries of positive science. Dante stands at the end of the old order of things, rising like a mighty mountain peak over the dead plain of medieval mediocrity.