The punishments described contain many striking points of similarity to Dante, both in their kind, and in the vivid manner in which they are portrayed. Of such are the icy cowls in chapter 26, which recall the leaden copes worn by the hypocrites in _Inf._ xxiii. 61 _sqq._ The sinners stand in black mire, like the _beletta negra_ where stand the gloomy-minded in _Inf._ vii. 124.[176] The scourging by demons occurs alike in the _Fis Adamnáin_(chapter 26), and in the _Inferno_ (xviii. 35). A cold wind from the north blows upon the foreheads of the damned, as in the frozen regions of Dante’s Tolommea.[177] The fiery rain, and the unavailing efforts of the sufferers to ward it off, anticipate Dante’s vivid picture.[178] With the throngs of demons in chapter 28, who assail the heresiarchs with flights of arrows, we may compare the Centaurs in _Inf._ xii. 56. The pictures of the sinners fettered to fiery columns by means of fiery chains in the form of vipers (chapter 25), and of those clad in fiery mantles, are entirely Dantesque in spirit. In the punishment of those who are alternately borne up to Heaven, and then dashed down again to the depth of Hell, our author appears to typify the tumultuous distress and horrible restlessness which accompany hopeless suffering. Two classes of sinners remain, who are dealt with in a manner wholly alien from Dante’s scheme, though in accord with the earlier teaching of the Church. Reference has been made already to those in whom good and evil bear divided sway, and who, as in the Avesta, are reserved in a place apart until the Day of Doom, when ‘judgment shall be passed between them, and their good shall quench their evil on that day, and then shall they be set in the Heaven of Life, in God’s own presence, through ages everlasting.’ This merciful solution of their case affords a strong contrast to the loathsome doom to which Dante consigns these Laodiceans.[179] One passage Dante himself might have been willing to own, had it not been so discordant with his doctrine: the picture of those charitable, but sensual, persons who are set upon islands--an echo of the _Imrama_--in the midst of a fiery sea, but protected from its waves by a silver bulwark, built of their own almsgiving, until Judgment, when they shall be delivered. These two conceptions, though not peculiar to the Irish Church, having been often promulgated, in various forms, by Jewish and Christian doctors alike, are characteristic of that leaning towards mercy, which, in one form or other, often appears in Irish ecclesiastical legends.[180] Our author declares that the state of the blest and of the reprobate alike, as revealed to him, is provisional only, and that after the Last Judgment the happiness of the righteous will be infinitely augmented, and the sufferings of the evil intensified in proportion,[181] when they shall be consigned to the fiery wall, which until then is inhabited by the demons only.[182]