The hags pursue their incantations; higher and higher flames their ghastly fire, and the grizzled wolves and spotted snakes slink in terror to their holes, as the shrieks and muttered spells of the beldams make the moon-forsaken night more hideous. But after piling up his horrors with the most elaborate skill, as if in the view of some terrible climax, the poet makes them collapse into utter farce. Disgusted by their intrusion on his privacy, the Priapus adopts a simple but exceedingly vulgar expedient to alarm these appalling hags. In an instant they fall into the most abject terror, suspend their incantations, and, tucking up their skirts, make off for the more comfortable quarters of the city as fast as their trembling limbs can carry them--Canidia, the great enchantress, dropping her false teeth, and her attendant Sagana parting company with her wig, by the way:-- "While you With laughter long and loud might view Their herbs, and charmed adders wound In mystic coils, bestrew the ground." And yet grave scholars gravely ask us to believe that Canidia was an old mistress of the poet's! These poems evidently made a success, and Horace returned to the theme in his 17th Epode. Here he writes as though he had been put under a spell by Canidia, in revenge for his former calumnies about her. "My youth has fled, my rosy hue Turned to a wan and livid blue; Blanched by thy mixtures is my hair; No respite have I from despair. The days and nights, they wax and wane, Yet bring me no release from pain; Nor can I ease, howe'er I gasp, The spasm, which holds me in its grasp." Here we have all the well-known symptoms of a man under a malign magical influence. In this extremity Horace affects to recant all the mischief he has formerly spoken of the enchantress. Let her name what penance he will, he is ready to perform it. If a hundred steers will appease her wrath, they are hers; or if she prefers to be sung of as the chaste and good, and to range above the spheres as a golden star, his lyre is at her service. Her parentage is as unexceptionable as her life is pure, but while ostentatiously disclaiming his libels, the poet takes care to insinuate them anew, by apostrophising her in conclusion, thus:-- "Thou who dost ne'er in haglike wont Among the tombs of paupers hunt For ashes newly laid in ground, Love-charms and philtres to compound, Thy heart is gentle, pure thy hands." Of course, Canidia is not mollified by such a recantation as this. The man who, "Branding her name with ill renown, Made her the talk of all the town," is not so lightly to be forgiven. "You'd have a speedy doom? But no, It shall be lingering, sharp, and slow." The pangs of Tantalus, of Prometheus, or of Sisyphus are but the types of what his shall be. Let him try to hang, drown, stab himself--his efforts will be vain:--