darkness. In this place Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts Of never-dying deaths; there damned souls Roar without pity, there are gluttons fed With toads and adders; there is burning oil Pour’d down the drunkard’s throat, the usurer Is forced to sup whole draughts of molten gold; There is the murderer for ever stabb’d, Yet can he never die; there lies the wanton On racks of burning steel, whilst in his soul He feels the torment of his raging lust.  (’Tis Pity she’s a Whore.)    I wrote this passage when very young, and the idea, trite as it is, was new to me. It occurs I believe in most descriptions of hell, and perhaps owes its origin to the fate of Crassus. After this picture of horrors, the reader may perhaps be pleased with one more pleasantly fanciful:  O call me home again dear Chief! and put me To yoking foxes, milking of he-goats, Pounding of water in a mortar, laving The sea dry with a nutshell, gathering all The leaves are fallen this autumn—making ropes of sand, Catching the winds together in a net, Mustering of ants, and numbering atoms, all That Hell and you thought exquisite torments, rather Than stay me here a thought more. I would sooner Keep fleas within a circle, and be accomptant A thousand year which of ’em, and how far Outleap’d the other, than endure a minute Such as I have within.  (B. Jonson. The Devil is an Ass.) 

  [7] During the siege of Jerusalem, “the Roman commander, with a generous clemency, that inseparable attendant on true heroism, laboured incessantly, and to the very last moment, to preserve the place. With this view, he again and again intreated the tyrants to surrender and save their lives. With the same view also, after carrying the second wall the siege was intermitted four days: to rouse their fears, prisoners, to the number of five hundred, or more were crucified daily before the walls; till space, Josephus says, was wanting for the crosses, and crosses for the captives.”—Churton’s Bampton Lectures. If any of my readers should enquire why Titus Vespasian, the Delight of Mankind, is placed in such a situation,—I answer, for this instance of “his generous clemency, that inseparable attendant on true heroism!” 

 

The Third Book

 The Maiden, musing on the Warrior’s words, Turn’d from the Hall of Glory. Now they reach’d A cavern, at whose mouth a Genius stood, In front a beardless youth, whose smiling eye Beam’d promise, but behind, withered and old, And all unlovely. Underneath his feet Lay records trampled, and the laurel wreath Now rent and faded: in his hand he held An hour-glass, and as fall the restless sands, So pass the lives 

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