fire and through water.” Thereupon, a devil in the shape of a fiery chariot receives him, and the other mockingly lifts him thereinto, and away he goes with the speed of lightning. Ere long the angel bade me look, and I saw the poor knight most horribly sodden in an enormous boiling furnace with Cain, Nimrod, Esau, Tarquin, Nero, Caligula, and others who first established lineage, and emblazoned family arms. After wending our way onward a little, my guide bade me peer through a riven wall, and within I saw a group of coquetts busily primming up, doing and undoing the deeds of folly they were formerly wont to do on earth; some puckering their lips, some plucking their eyebrows with irons, some anointing themselves, some patching their faces with black spots to make the yellow look whiter, and some endeavouring to crack the mirror; and after all the pains to color and adorn, upon seeing their faces far uglier than the devils’, they would tear away with tooth and nail all the false coloring, the spots, the skin and the flesh all at once, and would shriek most dismally. “Accursed be my father,” said one, “it was he who forced me when a girl to wed an old shrivelling, and it was his kindling my desires with no power to satiate them, that doomed me to this place.” “A thousand curses on my parents,” cried another, “for sending me to a monastery to be taught to live a life of chastity; they might as well have sent me to a Roundhead to learn how to be generous, or to a Quaker to be taught good manners, as to a Papist to be taught honesty.” “Fell ruin seize my mother,” shrieked a third, “whose covetous pride refused me a husband at my need, and so drove me to obtain by stealth what I might have honestly obtained.” “Hell, a double hell to the raging bull of a nobleman who first tempted me,” cried another, “had he not by fair and foul broken through all bounds, I would not have become a common chattel, nor would I have come to this infernal place;” and then would they lacerate themselves again.