Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/29

Rh place of God, forestalls the great Assize, exalts to the spheres or thrusts down into infernal caverns the souls of cowardly Popes, proud emperors, rapacious captains, enamored ladies, saints and warriors, hermits and thinkers, poets and politicians. No one is overlooked. Beside the queens of the thirteenth century appear the women of the Old Testament; beside the consuls of Rome, the painters of Tuscany. The king but newly dead converses with the Greek or Roman poet; the Christian martyr with the Florentine warrior.

Each has his penalty or his reward. Dante walks among them all in the guise of a spectator, but he is in reality their judge. The Divine Comedy is the Dies irae of a great spirit which cannot wait for the manifestation of divine wrath, and assigns a place provisionally to every man. It is an incomplete Vale of Jehoshaphat, in which all the dead are gathered, while beyond the dread hills the renewal of life goes on.

Dante felt that his genius was a divine investiture which gave him the right to judge those who had lived before his time. He was so sure of being a better representative of God than the venal priests and intriguing Popes of his experience that he did not hesitate to thrust into Hell men who passed themselves off before their fellow men as vicars and ministers of God. Thus