kewise attacks them for certain publications on topics not less
singular. The tales he has recounted, Oldham says, are only baits for
children, like toys at a fair; but they have their profounder and higher
matters for the learned and inquisitive. He goes on:--

One undertakes by scales of miles to tell
The bounds, dimensions, and extent of HELL;
How many German leagues that realm contains!
How many chaldrons Hell each year expends
In coals for roasting Hugonots and friends!
Another frights the rout with useful stories
Of wild chimeras, limbos--PURGATORIES--
Where bloated souls in smoky durance hung,
Like a Westphalia gammon or neat's tongue,
To be redeem'd with masses and a song.--SATIRE IV.

The readers of Oldham, for Oldham must ever have readers among the
curious in our poetry, have been greatly disappointed in the pompous
edition of a Captain Thompson, which illustrates none of his allusions.
In the above lines Oldham alludes to some singular works.

Treatises and topographical descriptions of HELL, PURGATORY, and even
HEAVEN, were once the favourite researches among certain zealous
defenders of the Romish Church, who exhausted their ink-horns in
building up a Hell to their own taste, or for their particular
purpose.[60] We have a treatise of Cardinal Bellarmin, a Jesuit, on
_Purgatory_; he seems to have the science of a surveyor among all the
secret tracks and the formidable divisions of "the bottomless pit."

Bellarmin informs us that there are beneath the earth four different
places, or a profound place divided into four parts. The deepest of
these places is _Hell_; it contains all the souls of the damned, where
will be also their bodies after the resurrection, and likewise all the
demons. The place nearest _Hell_ is _Purgatory_, where souls are purged,
or rather where they appease the anger of God by their sufferings. He
says that the same fires and the same torments are alike in both these
places, the only difference between _Hell_ and _Purgatory_ consisting in
their duration. Next to _Purgatory_ is the _limbo_ of those _infants_
who die without having received the sacrament; and the fourth place is
the _limbo_ of the _Fathers_; that is to say, of those _just men_ who
died before the death of Christ. But since the days of the Redeemer,
this last division is empty, like an apartment to be let. A later
catholic theologist, the famous Tillemont, condemns _all the illus