Forewarned is forearmed. Ulysses took all precautions against the opposite perils. Avoiding the Sicilian whirlpool, he did not run upon the Italian rock or yield to the voice of the charmer. And yet he could not renounce the opportunity of hearing the melody. Stuffing the ears of his companions with wax, so that they could not be entranced by the Sirens, or comprehend any countermanding order which his weakness might induce him to utter, he caused himself to be tied to the mast,--like another Farragut,--and directed that the ship should be steered straight on. It was steered straight on, although he cried out to stop. His deafened companions heard nothing of the song or the countermand,-- "Till, dying off, the distant sounds decay." The dangers of both coasts were at length passed, not without the loss of six men, "chiefs of renown," who became the prey of Scylla. But the Sirens, humbled by defeat, dashed themselves upon the rocks and disappeared forever. There are few stories which have been more popular. It was natural that it should enter into poetry and become a proverb. Milton more than once alludes to it. Thus, in the exquisite "Comus," He shows these opposite terrors subdued by another power:-- "Scylla wept And chid her barking waves into attention And fell Charybdis murmured soft applause." In the "Paradise Lost," while portraying Sin, the terrible portress at the gates of Hell, the poet repairs to this story for illustration:[5]-- "Far less abhorred than these, Vexed Scylla, bathing in the sea that parts Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore." And then again, when picturing Satan escaping from pursuit, he shows him[6] "harder beset And more endangered than when Argo passed Through Bosphorus betwixt the justling rocks, Or when Ulysses on the larboard shunned Charybdis and by the other whirlpool steered." Though thus frequently employing the story, Milton did not use the proverb. Not only the story but the proverb, was known to Shakspeare, who makes Launcelot use it in his plain talk with Jessica:[7]--"Truly, then, I fear you are damned both by father and mother; thus, when I shun Scylla, your father, I fall into Charybdis, your mother: well, you are gone both ways." Malone, in his note to this passage, written in the last century, says,--"Alluding to the well-known line of modern Latin poet, Philippe Gaultier, in his poem entitled 'Alexandreis.'" To this note of Malone's, another editor, George Steevens, whose early bibliographical tastes inspired the praise of Dibdin, adds as follows:--"Shakspeare might have met with a translation of this line in many places; among others in the Dialogue between _Custom and Veretie_, concerning the use and abuse of Dancing and Minstrelsie:-- "'While Silla they do seem to shun, In Charibd they do fall.'"