[33] The rickety state of Charon’s boat was always a fertile source of wit to the freethinkers among the classical satirists. Lucian, in one of his very amusing dialogues, makes Charon complain of his passengers bringing luggage with them: “My boat is something rotten, look you, and lets in a good deal of water at the seams; if you come on board with all that luggage you may repent it--especially those of you who can’t swim.”--(Dial. Mort., x.) So in another dialogue Menippus thinks it hard to be asked to pay for his passage over, when “he helped to bale the boat all the way.” It maybe observed that the boat is said to be made of hide, stretched on a wooden frame, like the “coracles” of the Britons, still in use on some of the Welsh rivers. There may be some connection with an ancient tradition which would identify the “white rock” of which Homer speaks (Od., xxiv. 11) as marking the entrance to the regions of the dead with the cliffs of our own island--“Albion.” A curious old legend of the coast of France gives some colour to the interpretation. There was a tribe of fishermen who were exempted from payment of tribute, on the ground that they ferried over into Britain the souls of the departed. At nightfall, when they were asleep (so the legend ran), they would be awakened by a loud knocking at their doors, and voices calling them, and feel a strange compulsion to go down to the seashore. There they found boats, not their own, ready launched, and to all appearance empty. “When they stepped on board and began to ply their oars they found the boats move as though they were heavily laden, sinking within a finger’s breadth of the water’s edge; but they saw no man. Within an hour, as it seemed, they reached the opposite coast--a voyage which in their own boats they hardly made in a whole day and night. When they touched the shore of Britain still they saw no shape, but they heard voices welcoming their ghostly passengers, and calling each of the dead by name and rank. Then having got rid, as it seemed, of their invisible freight, they put off again for home, feeling their boats so sensibly lightened that hardly more than the keel touched the water.--See Gesner’s Notes on Claudian, iii. 123; Procopius, De Bell. Goth., iv. 20. [34] We have here the foundation of the fanciful doctrine of a Limbo Infantum, held by some doctors of the Romish Church--a kind of vestibule to the greater Purgatory, in which were placed the souls of such children as died before they were old enough to be admitted to the sacraments. [35] “Aloud she shrieked! for Hermes reappears; Round the dear shade she would have clung--’tis vain, The hours are past--too brief, had they been years; And him no mortal effort can detain: Swift, toward the realms that know not earthly day, He through the portal takes his silent way, And on the palace-floor a lifeless corse she lay.