wn light, innumerable men
and women here and there; and devils without number and without rest,
incessantly employing their strength in tormenting. Yes, there they
were, devils and damned, the devils roaring with their own torments, and
making the damned roar by means of the torments which they inflicted upon
them. I paid particular observation to the corner which was nearest me.
There I beheld the devils with pitchforks, tossing the damned up into the
air that they might fall headlong on poisoned hatchets or barbed pikes,
there to wriggle their bowels out. After a time the wretches would crawl
in multitudes, one upon another, to the top of one of the burning crags,
there to be broiled like mutton; from there they would be snatched afar,
to the top of one of the mountains of eternal frost and snow, where they
would be allowed to shiver for a time; thence they would be precipitated
into a loathsome pool of boiling brimstone, to wallow there in
conflagration, smoke and the suffocation of horrible stench; from the
pool they would be driven to the marsh of Hell, that they might embrace
and be embraced by the reptiles, many times worse than serpents and
vipers; after allowing them half an hour's dalliance with these creatures
the devils would seize a bundle of rods of steel, fiery hot from the
furnace, and would scourge them till their howling, caused by the
horrible inexpressible pain which they endured, would fill the vast abode
of darkness, and when the fiends deemed that they had scourged them
enough, they would take hot irons and sear their bloody wounds. . . ."

And this would have particularly pleased Borrow, who disliked and
condemned smoking:

"For one of late origin I will not deny, O Cerberus, that thou hast
brought to us many a booty from the island of our enemies, by means of
tobacco, a weed the cause of much deceit; for how much deceit is
practised in carrying it about, in mixing it, and in weighing it: a weed
which entices some people to bib ale; others to curse, swear, and to
flatter in order to obtain it, and others to tell lies in denying that
they use it: a weed productive of maladies in various bodies, the excess
of which is injurious to every man's body, without speaking of his
_soul_: a weed, moreover, by which we get multitudes of the poor, whom we
should never get did they not set their love on tobacco, allow it to
master them, and pull the bread from the mouths of their children."

In the prefac