as Guelfs are found in his hell; Guelfs* as well as Ghibellines in his heaven. Indeed, Dante was never the man of a party, but the man of a noble cause. He offended the Ghibellines almost as much as the Guelfs. In this respect he was like our Milton,+ and almost every great poet, and (may we not add?) every purely righteous and truth-loving man. The events of Dante's life known to us, are soon told. He was the son of a Florentine of good family-perhaps of Roman origin-the oldest known member of which-Cacciaguida-Dante himself mentions in his poem (Paradiso, xv. 88.) The poet's father died while his son was young, and left him to be educated by his mother. She fulfilled her charge well. Dante enjoyed the first advantages of his day. One of his tutors was Brunetto Latini, the foremost scholar of his time. He also studied at the Universities of Padua and Bologna. Amongst his early friends are mentioned Guido Cavalcanti, the painter Giotto, and Casella, the musician. As might be expected from his family, his education, and his talents, Dante gradually rose to the highest civic offices in Florence. Having fought for his country at the battle of Campaldini (1289), and at the taking of Caprona (1290), he was afterwards employed on several embassies, and became one of the chief magistrates of Florence. But in 1300, while he was away on an embassage to Rome, his fellow citizens, led by one of those terrible factions that destroyed Italian freedom, pronounced his banishment from Florence for ever. From 1300 to 1321, the time of his death, the poet lived an exile from his beloved city Florence, and a wanderer from country to country, and from city to city. We hear of him in many Italian cities, as Verona, Padua, Arezzo, Ravenna, in Paris, and Boccaccio says, in Oxford, and in Germany. His wandering life was unhappy. His proud spirit could ill brook a life of dependance upon the bounty of the great. He had none of the arts by which men ingratiate themselves with princes and nobles. Proud, taciturn, satirical, indignant against all wrongs, he found no congenial home in the castles of the Charles I. of Naples, Purg. vii. 3. + Macaulay's Essays, vol. i., p. 25. The best life of Dante we know is by Cary, prefixed to his translation. Ghibelline chiefs. In Paradise the poet's ancestor, Cacciaguida, foretold to him the bitterness of his lot. "Thou shalt leave each thing Beloved most dearly. This is the first shaft By other's stairs. But that shall gall thee most Will be the worthless and vile company, With whom thou must be thrown into these straits. For all ungrateful, impious all and mad, Shall turn 'gainst thee; but in a little while Theirs, and not thine, shall be the crimson'd brow."* But, sad as was his lot, bitter as it and Italy's wrongs made him, his spirit was undaunted and unbroken. He says he felt himself "on all sides well squared to fortune's blows," Parad. xvii. 24 f.; comp. 101-136. Still, he died at the age of fifty-six, invincible in heart, but not in body!+ A characteristic and probable story is recorded of him. The abbot of a monastery saw a stranger walking sadly and meditatively through the cloisters of his monastery. The stranger, as if lost in the search of something, gave no heed to the presence of the abbot and his monks, but continued his thoughtful, anxious walk. At length the abbot approached him, asking him the object of his search. Slowly and solemnly the stranger turned around, answering, "Peace." But "peace" was not for Dante in this life. His lot was to seek, to struggle, to die, and then to be at peace. In this short account of Dante's life, we have purposely omitted one of the greatest, if not the greatest, fact in his history-his first love-his love of Beatrice. The great poet never names his wife, Gemma Donati, to whom he was married in his 26th year, and never saw again after his banishment from Florence. Nothing is certainly known as to his separation from her beyond the fact. But Beatrice Portinari is the inspiring spirit of his great work. She obtains for him permission to journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. She gains for him the guidance of the poet Virgil through Hell Cary, Paradise xvii. 55—65. Dante's remains were rediscovered at Ravenna, in 1865. Sec Cornhill Magazine, June, 1866. Comp. Longfellow's Sonnet, Dante, "Tuscan that wanderest." and Purgatory, and herself guides him through Heaven. She does it all for the salvation of his soul. To Dante she is the embodiment of all knowledge, love, and goodness. He met her when he was nine years old, and she a little younger. From that moment he loved her with the most passionate and romantic love. But she married another, and died young, about 1290. Death only spiritualized the poet's love. Beatrice became his high and passionately loved ideal. He saw in her all the excellences that his Church adored in the Holy Virgin. His love for her was a refining and softening fire. It would help to keep his indignant and disdainful spirit compassionate and tender. (To be continued.) SUGGESTIONS FOR A CATHOLIC VISIBLE CHURCH. O NE of the chief difficulties of Protestantism is to reconcile the visibility and the catholicity of the Church. That a congregation, which is but the fragment of a sect, should in any sense claim catholicity, seems absurd. For a church, again, avowedly to exclude those whom it acknowledges to be Christians, and in whose fellowship it recognizes the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, appears simply suicidal. The Romanist maxim is at least consistent, Nulla salus extra ecclesiam; and it is not surprising that our age, which speaks so much, and in such various tones, of catholicity, has witnessed the reassertion of the old exclusive doctrine, as in the writings of Archbishop Manning, with a prouder dogmatism than ever. On the other hand, the movement for "Promoting the Unity of Christendom," shows the dream of many still to be to unite at least the three great Episcopal communions; while Protestants, harassed by the variety of opinions and the discordance of sects, are everywhere labouring hard to devise some means of embodying and disclosing to the world the great spiritual reality of all believers' fellowship in Christ. The difficulty indeed is unfelt where it is held legitimate for each several party of Christians to make its own belief a condition of church fellowship. If Calvinists, for instance, are right in forming a Calvinistic church; Millenarians, a church of believers in the Second Advent; Pædobaptists, a church in which the propriety of Infant Baptism shall be imposed as an article of faith, and so on; an endless subdivision becomes the recognized law of Christ's kingdom. Any tenet, in fact, that can command a sufficient number of adherents, may be made a term of communion. Nay, it often happens that a doctrine is insisted on with a tenacity proportioned to its insignificance; and hence it is found that the great sects of the Christian world are accompanied by a number of little communities, framed according to similar laws of exclusion, and caricaturing, each one by its own infinitesimal specialty, the "distinctive doctrines" of the more considerable churches. With the pro gress of theological study, and the increasing definiteness of religious thought, it is certain that such communities must become more and more numerous so long as ecclesiastical separation on the non-essentials of Christianity shall be esteemed lawful among us. For where is the authority to define the beliefs on which believers in Christ may properly part company? Men are sure to differ greatly in their estimate of the comparative importance of truths. A variation in opinion which may appear to me a mere personal divergence, quite compatible with Christian fellowship, will seem to my neighbour a sufficient basis for denominational separation. In fact there seems no logical halting-place, until for Catholicity we have Chaos,-"Every man his own denomination." Surely one of the most wonderful signs of these latter days. is the existence and history of the Evangelical Alliance; an institution whose avowed purpose, to a great extent very nobly accomplished, has been to bring Christian people of different churches into fellowship-the impossibility of bringing them into church fellowship being all the while calmly recognized! The Institution which Christ established to reveal the unity of His people is thus set aside as inefficient, and a Society is de vised to accomplish the work. The late Archbishop Whately saw clearly enough that the only real Evangelical Alliance must be the Church; and that a Christian communion which refused to be church communion must bring either the Christianity or the churchmanship into serious question. Marvellous indeed is it to hear Christian people all around us saying, "We are one-everywhere but in the church. We can meet on platforms, but not at the communion table; can recognize one another's Christianity in all places but the Christian family; and can unite in every work of faith and love, outside the sphere of our ecclesiastical arrangements!" Is it credible that ecclesiastical arrangements of which this can be said can always endure? No, if the church is worth anything to us, it is as the true expression of our deepest religious life, our most spiritual fellowship. Let this cease to be its character, and like all institutions that have lost their meaning, it must collapse. Rather let us hope that the life which is still within will shape its vehicle into a new and grander form; and that instead of dissolving to re-combine, the churches will become so expanded and spiritualized as adequately to express the life and power of the common faith. We plead then for comprehension; and here for the moment may seem at one with that considerable party in the English Church, which, in opposition to "Evangelical" and "Ritualistic" limitations alike, so persistently urges the demand for freedom. Our sympathy with these churchmen would be much greater, had they not seemed to us to surrender their liberty before claiming it. To subscribe the Articles and accept the formularies of the Anglican Establishment, is a singular step towards emancipation from the tyranny of creeds. Frankly, we cannot understand how any English clergyman can with perfect honesty avow at the same time his mental independence and his submission to the requirements of his church. Were there no other objections to the Establishment, this ought to be fatal. To hold by creeds and forms which mean nothing, to acquire a habit of evading declarations, which, to plain minds, appear perfectly explicit, or to have to fall back upon the plea that "the legal is the measure of the moral obligation," is a very serious price to pay for intellectual emancipation. If, practically, the Angli |