to it is a very ancient Roman well. It is an instance of the irony of etymology that the word 'Hell' means a place of fireless darkness. Nor is the fact that the name of the Scandinavian demoness Hel, phonetically corresponding with Kali, 'the Black One' (Goth. Halja), whose abode was an icy hole, has her name preserved as a place of fiery torment, without significance. In regions where cold was known to an uncomfortable extent as well as heat, we usually find it represented in the ideas of future punishment. The realm called Hades, meaning just the same as Hell, suggests cold. Tertullian and Jerome say that Christ's own phrases 'outer darkness' and the 'gnashing (chattering) of teeth' suggest a place of extreme cold alternating with the excessive heat. Traces of similar speculations are found with the Rabbins. Thus Rabbi Joseph says Gehenna had both water and fire. Noah saw the angel of death approaching and hid from him twelve months. Why twelve? Because (explains Rabbi Jehuda) such is the trial of sinners,--six in water, six in fire. Dante (following Virgil) has frigid as well as burning hells; and the idea was refined by some scholiasts to a statement which would seem to make the alternations of future punishment amount to a severe ague and fever. Milton (Paradise Lost, ii.) has blended the rabbinical notions with those of Virgil (Æn. vi.) in his terrible picture of the frozen continent, where The parching air Burns frore, and cold performs th' effect of fire: Thither by harpy-footed Furies haled At certain revolutions all the damn'd Are brought; and feel by turns the bitter change Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce, From beds of raging fire to starve in ice Their soft etherial warmth, and there to pine Immovable, infix'd, and frozen round. With which may be compared Shakespeare's lines in 'Measure for Measure'-- The de-lighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice. In Thibet hell is believed to have sixteen circles, eight burning, eight frozen, which M. Delepierre attributes to the rapid changes of their climate between the extremes of heat and cold. [46] Plutarch, relating the vision of Thespesius in Hades, speaks of the frozen region there. Denys le Chartreux (De Poenis Inferni) says the severest of infernal torments is freezing. In the 'Kalendar of Shepherds' (1506) a legend runs:--'Lazarus sayde, 'I sawe a flode of frosone yce in the whiche envyous men and women were plonged unto the navyll, and then sodynly came a colde wynde ryght great that blewe and dyd depe downe all the envyous into the colde water that nothynge was seen of them.' Such, too, is Persian Ardá Viráf's vision.