enough to banish the profane. But yet I commend to your sympathy the tanner condemned to stand upon the pillory three days in the next market for "hastening the Tanning of his Leather by giving it unkind Heats by hot Wooze (whatever that may be) or otherwise." (1 Jac. I. c. 22, sect. 17.)

Those who know the by-ways of the City of London will be interested to see a list of the remains of the ancient "Liberties," where for a very long time the law had scarcely any footing at all. Anyone opposing the execution of a process in those nests of infamy were to be committed to gaol, "without Bail or Mainprize." The places catalogued were these:-"White-Fryers, Savoy, Salisbury Court, Ram Alley, Mitre Court, Fuller's Rents, Baldwyn's Gardens, Mountague Close, the Minories, Mint, Chink, or Deadman's Place." Some of these parts have still an ugly sound, but for the most part little "resistance to process" is expected from their inhabitants.

Below "Process" my eye catches "Prophecies," and I read that "the publisher or setter forth of any fantastical or false Prophecy, with an attempt to raise sedition," was, under Elizabeth, to be subjected to a penalty of £10 and one year's imprisonment, and for a second offence to forfeit all his goods and to be imprisoned for life. The prosecution was to be within six months. This seems to provide but scant time to prove whether the fantastical prophecy be true or false after all.

The well-known laws as to attendance at church, dating from the reign of Queen Elizabeth, are of course most searching and stringent, but they are all, we remember, robbed of their sting by the legislation of 1 William and Mary, by which Protestant Dissenters were declared to be exempted from their penalties. Previously, persons not repairing to church forfeited twelve pence for the poor, and by an earlier statute "persons above sixteen, absenting from Church above one Month, impugning the Queen's authority in causes Ecclesiastical, frequenting conventicles, or persuading others so to do, under Pretence of Exercise of Religion," were required to conform at once, or abjure the realm, having previously undergone imprisonment.

It is instructive to notice that a statute of Charles II. was in force by which incumbents "not reading Divine Service once a Month " were liable to forfeit five pounds for every offence. There seems to be a subtle connection between this and the above.

The many pages of the Companion that are occupied with "Papists and Popish Superstitions," with their vexatious and humiliating restrictions on personal liberty, disclose the tremendous

power wielded in matters of the conscience by magistrates often opinionated and prejudiced. The greatest enemy of the Pope nowadays would shrink from forbidding his followers the exercise of the worship they understand, and would surely deprecate the breaking-up of crucifixes in open court, the searching of Roman Catholic houses for books and relics, and a year's imprisonment for being present at Mass.

Stat. 5 Elizabeth again bears heavily on believers in the traditional mode of fasting, but is delightfully quaint in its wording. "Persons preaching or otherwise avouching, or notifying, That any eating of Flesh, or forbearing of Flesh, is necessary for the Service of God, otherwise than as other political laws allow," are to be punished "as spreaders of false News."

Such is some of the light of reality which an old calf-bound book can cast on the lives of Englishmen 150, 200, 300 years ago. Coming from the practical wear and tear of everyday, with no halo of romance around it, it seems to bid us to be grateful for the tolerance, the comfort, and the progress of our own time, and to boast with Glaucus,

ἡμεῖς τοι πατέρων μέγ' αμείνονες εὐχόμεθ ̓ εἶναι.

W. J. FERRAR.

VOL. CCLXXXV. NO. 2013.

S

THE ANGELS OF THE DIVINE

WHI

COMEDY.

HILE the angels of Milton have been likened to the glorious athletes of the Sistine Chapel, beautiful but altogether human, Dante's angels are reflected more truly in the tender, spiritual and yet strong and triumphant creations of Fra Angelico. No earthly models sat for the angels of the angelic brother. He had so often seen a vision of angels that he needed no earthly models any more. He had "seen their white robes, whiter than the dawn, at his bedside as he awoke in early summer. They had sung with him, one on each side, when his voice failed for joy, at sweet vesper and matin time; his eyes were blinded by their wings in sunset when it sank behind the hills of Luini." And nothing earthly enters into Dante's conceptions of the angels which he describes with such pathetic longing to again behold them. He, too, has seen his vision. Through his pages runs this procession of glorious beings such as only he can sing, such as only Fra Angelico can paint. The breath of heaven is around them, the light of heaven is in their faces, they follow each other like the figures in some mystic dance; there is strength, grace, vitality in each, but above all there is a wonderful individuality, distinctiveness, which eludes analysis. A line, a touch, a something which we know not how to grasp, and the picture is there complete, perfected, drawn for all time, engraved for ever on the heart of literature.

The first of this "family of heaven" is found in the ninth canto of the "Inferno." Dante and Vergil have come to the sable lagoon, wrapt in morass fog through which the red-hot mosques of the sad city of Dis are dimly seen: "red pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom; so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and for ever." A little boat takes the travellers through the stagnant canal, and we remember

Visendus ater flumine languido
Cocytos errans,

as well as the tristique palus inamabilis unda of Vergil. While making their way towards the city, the pathetic incident of the meeting with Philippo Argenti occurs; the exasperate spirit Florentine, "forgotten by history and immortalised in song." "Thou seest I am one who weeps," he says, raising his squalid form from the black mire; but for him the other Florentine has no pity. "With weeping and with wailing, maledict spirit, do thou remain," is Dante's reply as he recognises him of whom the gentle Vergil has nothing but evil to recount :

This was an arrogant person in the world:

Goodness is none that decks his memory;
So likewise here his shade is furious.

And they turn away: "quivi 'l lasciammo; che più non ne narro:" "there we left him; more of him I write not!"

Arrived at the gates of the city of Dis more than a thousand sad spirits endeavour to bar their entrance, and even Vergil quails when he finds the doors are shut against him. The difficulties of the way are further increased by the appearance on the "high tower with red flaming summit" of the three Furies, wreathed with green snakes and their temples crowned with little serpents, threatening the intruders with the sight of the Medusa, placed here, perhaps, because the only one of the Gorgones who was mortal. But help is at hand; and that help is brought by the first angel of the Commedia. For,

Now there came across the turbid waves
The clangour of a sound with terror fraught,
Not otherwise it was than of a wind

Impetuous on account of adverse heats,

That smites the forest, and without restraint
The branches rends, beats down, and bears away;
Right onward, laden with dust, it goes superb.

Superb, too, is the angel who comes in this whirlwind, but there is no description of the glories of his face or of his robes. They are hinted at, not expressed; and the picture is perhaps more exquisite for the lines left out. "Ah! how he appeared to me full of disdain," exclaims the susceptible poet who is for ever studying the faces of those he meets. "More than a thousand ruined souls" flee before the angel who passes over the river marsh with soles unwet, fanning with his left hand the unctuous air from his face, "and only with that anguish seemed he weary." He opens the door, for to him there is no resistance, and then returns along the black fen,

And spake no word to us, but had the look

Of one whom other care constrains and goads

Than that of him who in his presence is.

This disdainful angel had come to a world to which all good was foreign, the very territory of evil. And yet even here, in their own land in their own'high places, the principalities and powers of darkness can but fly before the strength that is in this one celestial visitor, collapsing at the first on-coming ray of his brightness.

The angels of the "Purgatorio" are altogether of another type to this, the sole angel of the "Inferno." The first occurs in the second canto, and fitly to understand its beauties we must again consider the setting, the world in which it is placed.

A great writer has said, wrongly as I venture to think, that the forms of the external world, by which I suppose he means what we call nature, have made but little impression on Dante. "He leaves to others the earth, the ocean, and the sky. His business is with man." And Dante's business is indeed with the spirit world of man, that is the subject of his picture. But yet his whole work is gemmed with recollections of the sweet Latin land which he has left for a time. No other writer, not even Shakespeare, is so absolutely permeated with remembrances of nature; amid the glories of heaven, his thoughts go back perpetually to the glories of earth; amid the stifling airs of the "Inferno" they are ever with him too. His scene is laid in other realms than those of nature as we know it, but at the least hint he turns aside to the old familiar things. Eyes smarting with hell smoke look beyond and see flowers uplifting their heads in the morning sun; starlings in their winter flocks; turtle doves flying home to their sweet nest; the falcon alighting far from his master, "sullen and disdainful ;" the hoar-frost copying on the ground the outer semblance of her sister white; the fire-flies in the valley— eyes and ears are full of such things as these when the man is surrounded by darkness and shrill cries. Nature is not his theme indeed as it is Wordsworth's; but it is constantly in his thoughts. Not as if in parentheses do these images recur to him, but as if they were always close to him in his sad journey. And when he leaves the hopeless world, it is with a sigh of relief to find that he can

Again behold the stars.

And in the first canto of the "Purgatorio," how the whole man rejoices in the beauty and light which he once more sees around him in the mystic world into which he is entering. For it is indeed in some respects a world like our own: there is the sea, there are the stars, the valley with its radiant flowers, the forest, sun-rise, sun-set. But there are, too, the seven terraces or circles in which the seven mortal sins are expiated, reached by narrow staircases, each with its porter