[297] _The half circle_: This Fourth Circle is divided half-way round between the misers and spendthrifts, and the two bands at set periods clash against one another in their vain effort to pass into the section belonging to the opposite party. Their condition is emblematical of their sins while in life. They were one-sided in their use of wealth; so here they can never complete the circle. The monotony of their employment and of their cries represents their subjection to one idea, and, as in life, so now, their displeasure is excited by nothing so much as by coming into contact with the failing opposite to their own. Yet they are set in the same circle because the sin of both arose from inordinate desire of wealth, the miser craving it to hoard, and the spendthrift to spend. In Purgatory also they are placed together (see _Purg._ xxii. 40). So, on Dante's scheme, liberality is allied to and dependent on a wise and reasonable frugality.--There is no hint of the enormous length of the course run by these shades. Far lower down, when the circles of the Inferno have greatly narrowed, the circuit is twenty-two miles (_Inf._ xxix. 9). [298] _Clerks_: Churchmen. The tonsure is the sign that a man is of ecclesiastical condition. Many took the tonsure who never became priests. [299] _I ought, etc._: Dante is astonished that he can pick out no greedy priest or friar of his acquaintance, when he had known so many. [300] _Dimming, etc._: Their original disposition is by this time smothered by the predominance of greed. Dante treats these sinners with a special contemptuous bitterness. Scores of times since he became dependent on the generosity of others he must have watched how at a bare hint the faces of miser and spendthrift fell, while their eyes travelled vaguely beyond him, and their voices grew cold. [301] _Ruined locks_: 'A spendthrift will spend his very hair,' says an Italian proverb. [302] _The happy land_: Heaven. [303] _Her claws_: Dante speaks of Fortune as if she were a brutal and somewhat malicious power. In Virgil's answer there is a refutation of the opinion of Fortune given by Dante himself, in the _Convito_ (iv. 11). After describing three ways in which the goods of Fortune come to men he says: 'In each of these three ways her injustice is manifest.' This part of the _Convito_ Fraticelli seems almost to prove was written in 1297. [304] _Framing, etc._: According to the scholastic theory of the world, each of the nine heavens was directed in its motion by intelligences, called angels by the vulgar, and by the heathen, gods (_Convito_ ii. 5). As these spheres and the influences they exercise on human affairs are under the guidance of divinely-appointed ministers, so, Virgil says, is the distribution of worldly wealth ruled by Providence through Fortune.