ump, whose work in raising desires which he could not gratify
has driven me hither." "A thousand curses on my parents," would another
say, "for sending me to a cloister to learn chastity; they would not have
done worse in sending me to a roundhead to learn generosity, or to a
quaker to learn manners, than to a papist to learn honor." "Destruction,"
said another, "seize my mother for her avaricious pride in preventing my
obtaining a husband when I wanted one, and thus obliging me to purloin
the thing I might have honorably come by." "Hell, and double Hell to the
lustful wretch of a gentleman, who first began tempting me," would the
third say; "if he had not, betwixt fair and foul, broken the hedge, I had
not become a cell open to every body, nor had I come to this cell of
devils!" And then they fell to tearing themselves again.

I was glad to quit such a pack of female dogs. But before I had passed
on many steps, I was surprised to see another shoal of imprisoned
wenches, twice more detestable than they. Some had been changed into
toads, some into dragons, some into serpents who were swimming and
hissing, glavering and butting in a fetid, stagnant pool, much larger
than Llyn Tegid. {84} "In the name of wonder," said I, "what sort of
creatures may these be?" "There are here," said he, "four sorts of
wenches, all notoriously bad. First, there are procuresses, with some of
the principal lasses of their respective bevies about them. Second,
gossiping ladies with a swarm of their news-bearing hags. Third,
bouncing madams, and a pack of sneaking curs on both sides of them, for
no man, but for downright fear of them, would ever go nigh them. Fourth,
scolds, become a hundred times more horrible than vipers, with their
poisonous stings going creak, creak to all eternity."

"I had imagined that Lucifer had been a king of too much courtesy, to put
a gentlewoman of my rank with such little petty she-devils as these,"
said one, something like a winged serpent, only that she was much more
fierce. "O that he would send here, seven hundred of the worst devils in
Hell in exchange for thee, thou poisonous hell-spawn!" said another ugly
viper. "O! many thanks to you," said a gigantic devil who overheard
them, "we set too much value on our place and merits, to condescend to
become mates of yours; and though we are willing to admit that you are
fully as competent to torment people as the best of us, we would,
nevertheless, not