The moral truths in which the great poem abounds are numberless and of infinite interest. On these I cannot dwell, for to him who penetrates to the inner meaning of the allegory they are found on every page. But I may point out one or two supreme lessons which run throughout the teaching.
One is the lesson that like makes like--the lesson of modification by environment. We know how in Norfolk Island the convicts often degenerated almost into fiends because they associated with natures which had made themselves fiend-like, and were cut off from gentle, wholesome, and inspiring influences.
So it is in Dante's "Inferno." His evil men and seducers wax ever worse and worse because they have none around them save souls lost like their own. There is no brightening touch in the "Inferno." The name of Christ is never mentioned in its polluted air. The only angel who appears in it is not one of the radiant Sympathies, with fair golden heads and dazzling faces and wings and robes of tender green, of the "Purgatory," not one of the living topazes or golden splendors of the "Paradise"; but is stern, disdainful, silent, waving from before his face all contact with the filthy gloom. His Lucifer is no flickering, gentlemanly, philosophic man of the world like Goethe's Mephistopheles, nor like Milton's Fallen Cherub, whose
"Form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined, or excess Of glory obscured;"
but is a three-headed monster of loathly ugliness, with faces yellow with envy, crimson with rage, and black with ignorance; not haughty, splendid, defiant, but foul and loathly as sin itself.
It was in the days of civil strife in Florence. The Republic, like the fickle mistress that she was, was stripping and turning out of doors her best servants, and was petting and clothing with honor her worst ones. Among those who, driven by the decree of banishment, hurried out of the city's southern gate were the parents of Francesco Petrarch. They retired to the little town of Arezzo, and there he was born in 1304, soon after their banishment. As she looked at her boy, his mother, Eletta, very likely mourned to think that he would not be able in after life to boast of being a native of fair Florence. She did not know that in future ages Florence was to count it among her highest distinctions that this child was of Florentine race.