I cut this visit short, to see what news in a deep vault near at hand, where we heard a great bustle and contest betwixt divers souls and the devils. There were the presumptuous, the revengeful, and the envious, gaping and crying out as they would break their hearts. “Oh, that I could but be born again!” says one; “Oh, that I might back into the world again!” says another; “Oh, that I were but to die once more!” cries a third. Insomuch that they put the devils out of all patience, with their impertinent and unprofitable wishes and exclamations. “Hang yourselves,” cried they, “for a pack of cozening, bawling rascals: you live again? and be born again? and what if you might do’t a thousand times over? You would only die at last a thousand times greater villains than now you are, and there would be no clearing hell of you with a dog-whip. However, to try you and make you know yourselves, we have commission to let you live again and return. Up then ye varlets, go, be born again; get ye into the world again. Away,” cried the devils, with a lusty lash at every word, and thrust hard to have got them out. But the poor rogues hung an arse, and were struck with such a terror, to hear of living again, and returning, that they slunk into a corner, and lay as quiet upon’t, as lambs. At length, one of the company that seemed to have somewhat more brain and resolution than his fellows, entered very gravely upon the debate, whether they should go out or no. “If I should now,” says he, “at my second birth, come into the world a bastard, the shame would be mine, though my parents committed the fault; and I should carry the scandal and the infamy of it to my grave. Now put case, my mother should be honest, (for that’s not impossible) and that I came into the world, legitimate; how many follies, vices, and diseases are there that run in a blood! Who knows, but I should be mad, or simple? swear, lie, cheat, whore; nay if I came off, with a little mortification of my carcase, as the stone, the scurvy, or the noble pox, I were a happy man. But oh the lodging, the diet, and the cookery that I am to expect for a matter of nine months in my mother’s belly; and then the butter and beer that must be spent to sweeten me, when I change my quarter. I must come crying into the world, and live in ignorance even of what life is till I die; and then as ignorant of death too, till ’tis passed. I fancy my swaddling-clouts and blankets to be worse than my winding-sheet; my cradle represents my tomb. And then who knows, whether my nurse shall be found, or no? She’ll over-lay me perhaps; leave me some four and twenty hours, it may be, without clean clouts, and a pin or two all the while, perchance, up to the hilts in my backside. And then follows breeding of teeth, and worms; with all the gripes and disorders that are caused by unwholesome milk. These miseries are certain, and why should I run them over again?