Note 6 — The Vision of the Maid of Orléans

The same idea, and almost the same words are in an old play by John Ford. The passage is a very fine one: Ay, you are wretched, miserably wretched, Almost condemn’d alive! There is a place, (List daughter!) in a black and hollow vault, Where day is never seen; there shines no sun, But flaming horror of consuming fires; A lightless sulphur, choak’d with smoaky foggs Of an infected darkness. In this place Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts Of never-dying deaths; there damned souls Roar without pity, there are gluttons fed With toads and adders; there is burning oil Pour’d down the drunkard’s throat, the usurer Is forced to sup whole draughts of molten gold; There is the murderer for ever stabb’d, Yet can he never die; there lies the wanton On racks of burning steel, whilst in his soul He feels the torment of his raging lust. (’Tis Pity she’s a Whore.) I wrote this passage when very young, and the idea, trite as it is, was new to me. It occurs I believe in most descriptions of hell, and perhaps owes its origin to the fate of Crassus. After this picture of horrors, the reader may perhaps be pleased with one more pleasantly fanciful: O call me home again dear Chief! and put me To yoking foxes, milking of he-goats, Pounding of water in a mortar, laving The sea dry with a nutshell, gathering all The leaves are fallen this autumn—making ropes of sand, Catching the winds together in a net, Mustering of ants, and numbering atoms, all That Hell and you thought exquisite torments, rather Than stay me here a thought more. I would sooner Keep fleas within a circle, and be accomptant A thousand year which of ’em, and how far Outleap’d the other, than endure a minute Such as I have within. (B. Jonson. The Devil is an Ass.)