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 to cut up with the small knives the poem of Rimini. Let us hasten to take one glance at the real business of the piece,—the incest of Paolo and Francesca. All the preparations for the actual sin are invented by our Poet "in his own fine free way." The scene is in a little antique temple adorned by sculpture, and had Mr Hunt filled his freezes with funeral processions, or with the agonies of Orestes, or the despair of Œdipus, we might indeed have acknowledged that there was some propriety in his fancy. But as he has made of his temple a bagnio, so is its furniture conceived in the very spirit of the place.

We do not remember any thing in the whole of Hunt's writings worse, than the allusion in these verses to the well known song of the Pitchers of Coleraine.

How inferior is the conception of the time to that scene of moon-light mystery which we have already quoted from Parasina.

But all this is nothing to the forebodings and presentiments, with which he skilfully represents the mind of Francesca as being filled, when she approaches in silence the scene of her infamy. The indecent attitudes of the nymphs on the cornice, can only be equalled by the blasphemous allusion to the history of our first parents, in depicting the thoughts of this incipient adulteress.

The incidents following this are all from Dante, but we shall endeavour to show, with some minuteness, how much the austere and simple Florentine has been obliged to the elegant rendering of the Cockney poet.

The bold genius of Dante never touched on ground more dangerous, than when he ventured to introduce into his poem the most dismal catastrophe which had ever befallen the family of his patron. Guido di Polento, Lord of Ravenna, the most generous friend of the Poet, had a lovely daughter, Francesca, who was betrothed in early years to Paolo Malatesta, a younger brother of the house of Rimini, and a perfect model of graceful chivalry; but afterwards compelled, by domestic tyranny, to become the wife of the elder brother of her lover, Lanciotto, a man savage in character, and deformed in person. The early flame, however, was not to be repressed, and the unfortunate sequel of their history is that which is so tenderly touched upon in the Inferno, and so diluted and debased in the Story of Rimini.

In the course of his perambulation of hell, the poet feigns that he came to one scene of misery entirely set apart for those who had fallen the victims of unlawful love. Among these he observes Semiramis, Helen, and Cleopatra; Achilles, Paris, and Tristram. But while he is yet gazing, with mingled fear and sorrow, on these