The first eleven cantos of the _Hell_ form a very distinct subdivision of the poem. They embrace, first, the introduction contained in Canto i.; secondly, the description of the place of punishment up to a point at which a marked change in the character of the sins punished is indicated. In one sense, no doubt, an important stage in the journey is completed when the City of Dis is reached, in Canto viii.; but it will be observed, when we reach that point, that the class of sinners who are met with immediately within the walls of the City, the Epicureans or, as we should now say, the Materialists, bear really a much stronger affinity to those who are outside the walls, those whose sin has been lack of self-restraint in one form or another, than they do to the worse criminals who have “offended of malicious wickedness,” and who lie at and below the foot of the steep guarded by the Minotaur. The former class at all events have been, to use a common phrase, “their own worst enemies;” their sins have not been, at any rate in their essence, like those of the latter, of the kind which break up the fabric of society, and with them the heretics may most naturally be considered. It can hardly be doubted that some such view as this led Dante to make the first great break of level in his scheme of the lower world at a point which would leave the freethinkers and materialists actually nearer to the sinners of whom he holds that their sin “men Dio offende,” even though theological exigencies compel him to place them within the walls of the “red-hot city.” We may thus conveniently take these eleven cantos for consideration as a group by themselves.