decide, may the just gods, and the goddesses of vengeance, doom me to die in pangs, worse than those under which I linger every day." "We have here," proceeds the historian, "the features of the inward man. His crimes retaliated upon him with the keenest retribution; so true is the saying of the great philosopher [Socrates], the oracle of ancient wisdom, that if the minds of tyrants were laid open to our view, we should see them gashed and mangled with the whips and stings of horror and remorse. By blows and stripes the flesh is made to quiver, and, in like manner, cruelty and inordinate passions, malice and evil deeds, become internal executioners, and with unceasing torture goad and lacerate the heart. Of this truth Tiberius is a melancholy instance. Neither the imperial dignity, nor the gloom of solitude, nor the rocks of Capreæ, could shield him from himself. He lived on the rack of guilt, and his wounded spirit groaned in agony." Such a passage as this would have harmonised with the gloom of the 'Inferno.' In the opening stanzas of the 'Purgatorio,' Dante records his sense of relief from the regions of sorrow, and return to the light of day:—
The light bark of my genius lifts the sail,
Well pleased to leave so cruel sea behind,
And of that second region will I sing."
[Cary's Translation.]
And in the 'Agricola,' we find a corresponding welcome to the advent of Nerva and Trajan: "At length we begin to revive from our lethargy: the Emperor Nerva, in the beginning of this glorious era, has found means to reconcile two things, till now deemed incom-
