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Nor is it strange that in Russia the blackest Malebolge in the modern world a litter of avengers is born every generation of the savage brutality, the murderous oppression, the satanic infamy of the Russian government.

So complete and rapid was the degeneracy of his nature that, within a very few months after the time when he had passed for a good-natured man, he had brought himself to look on the despair and misery of his fellow creatures with a glee resembling that of the fiends whom Dante saw watching the pool of seething pitch in Malebolge.

Bodied or bodiless, it is the one fact important for all men: but to Dante, in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape; he no more doubted of that Malebolge Pool, that it all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, and that he himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went thither.

Perhaps I will not maintain the contrary Judas represented his motive in this way, and felt justified in his traitorous kiss; but my belief that he deserved, metaphorically speaking, to be where Dante saw him, at the bottom of the Malebolge, would not be the less strong because he was not convinced that his action was detestable.

Could we imagine a far other lost spirit than Farinata degli Uberti's endowed with Farinata's might of will, and transferred from the sepulchres of fire to the dykes of Malebolge, we might conceive something of Iago's attitude in hell of his unalterable and indomitable posture for all eternity.

All through the wonderful Cinquecento, when each of a dozen or more little Italian city-states was producing genius enough to furnish forth a good average century in modern Europe or America, Italy was also a hotbed of unnatural vices, lurid crimes, wickedness to stock the nine circles of Malebolge.

I often swear I will be buried at least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub ... if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I will fly this whirlpool as I would the Lake of Malebolge. The competence had come, the death of Mrs.

We rode the two miles, as I do not think Dora and I would ever have floundered through the mud and torrents that ran down the lanes. It was just as if the farm had been built in the lower circle, and the cottages in Malebolge itself, where the poor little Alfy, so pure when it started from Kalydon Moor, brought down to them all the leakage of that farmyard.

So complete and rapid was the degeneracy of his nature, that within a very few months after the time when he had passed for a good-natured man, he had brought himself to look on the despair and misery of his fellow-creatures with a glee resembling that of the fiends whom Dante saw watching the pool of seething pitch in Malebolge.

That is in the grand style, and so is the following, which describes those sinners locked in the frozen lake below Malebolge: "Weeping itself there does not let them weep, And grief that finds a barrier in the eyes Turns itself inward to increase the anguish. "Lo pianto stesso li pianger non lascia, E il duol, che trova in sugli occhi rintoppo, Si volve in entro a far crescer l' ambascia."