“It represents the symbolical passage of the Christian Church, preceded by the Hebrew dispensation, and followed by the disastrous effects of schism, and the corruptions induced by the unholy conduct of political Pontiffs. The soul of this solemn exhibition, the living and glorified principle of the beatitude which Religion pure and holy confers upon those who embrace it, is personified in the ‘Donna,’ to whom Dante from his earliest youth had been more or less devoted, the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova , ‘ Loda di Dio vera ,’ who concentrates in herself the divine wisdom with which the Church is inspired, whom angels delight to honor, and whose advent on earth had been prepared from all eternity by the moral virtues. “Beatrice is here presented as the principle of divine beatitude, or that which confers it, and bears a resemblance to the figure of the New Jerusalem seen by St. John descending from heaven ‘as a bride adorned for her husband’ ( Rev. 21:2); a representation of which, in the manner of Raphael, occurs in one of the tapestries of the Vatican, and, though not arrayed in the colors of the Christian virtues.