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.
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