htful stinking
filthiness, where was a herd of accursed drunken swine, disgorging and
swallowing, swallowing and disgorging, continually and without rest, the
most loathsome snivel. The next pit was the couch of gluttony, where
Dives and his companions were upon their bellies, eating dirt and fire
alternately, without any liquid ever. A cave or two lower there was an
exceedingly spacious kitchen, in which some were in a state of roasting
and boiling, others frying and burning in an oven half heated. "Behold
the place of the merciless and the unfeeling," said the angel. I then
turned a little to the left hand, where there was a cell more light than
any one which I had yet seen in Hell, and enquired what place it was?
"The abode of the infernal dragons," replied the angel, "who are hissing
and snarling, rushing and preying upon one another every minute." I
approached; and oh! the look which cannot be described was upon them, the
whole light was but the living fire in their eyes. "These are the seed
of Adam," said my guide, "morose wretches, and furious savage men; but,
yonder," said he, "are some of the old seed of the great dragon Lucifer;"
and verily, I could perceive not a whit more amiability in the one sort
than in the other. In the next cellar were the misers, in a state of
horrible agony with their hearts cleaving to coffers of burning treasure,
the rust whereof was ceaselessly cankering them, because those hearts had
been ceaselessly bent upon getting money--O the consuming torment, worse
than frenzy, that was now going on within them, with care and repentance.
Below this there was a hanging ledge, where there were some apothecaries
ground to dust, and stuffed into earthen pots amongst album grecum, dung
of geese and swine, and many an old stinking ointment.

We were now journeying forward, continually descending, along the
wilderness of Destruction, through innumerable torments, eternal and not
to be described--from cell to cell, from cellar to cellar, and the last
always surpassing the others in horror and ghastliness; at last we
arrived at a vast porch, more cheerless than any thing we had seen
before. It was a very spacious porch, and the pathway through it, which
was frightfully steep, led to a kind of dusky nook of incredible ugliness
and horror, and there the palace was. At the upper end of the accursed
court, among thousands of horrible objects, I could, by means of the
radiance of my heavenly comp