CHA. Woes me, ye gentle shades! where shall I dwell?
He's come! It is not safe to be in hell.

CHORUS.
Thus man, his honor lost, falls on these shelves;
Furies and fiends are still true to themselves.

CHA. You must, lost fool, come in. W. Oh, let me in!
But now I fear thy boat will sink with my ore-weighty sin.
Where, courteous Charon, am I now? CHA. Vile rant!<81.2>
At the gates of thy supreme Judge Rhadamant.

DOUBLE CHORUS OF DIVELS.
Welcome to rape, to theft, to perjurie,
To all the ills thou wert, we canot hope to be;
Oh, pitty us condemned! Oh, cease to wooe,
And softly, softly breath, least you infect us too.

<81.1> This word is used here merely to denote a GALLANT,
a FELLOW. From being in its primitive sense a most honourable
appellation, it became, during and after the civil war between
Charles and the Parliament, a term of equivocal import.

<81.2> Here equivalent to RANTER, and used for the sake of the
metre.

THE TOAD AND SPYDER.

A DUELL.

Upon a day, when the Dog-star
Unto the world proclaim'd a war,
And poyson bark'd from black throat,
And from his jaws infection shot,
Under a deadly hen-bane shade
With slime infernal mists are made,
Met the two dreaded enemies,
Having their weapons in their eyes.

First from his den rolls forth that load
Of spite and hate, the speckl'd toad,
And from his chaps a foam doth spawn,
Such as the loathed three heads yawn;
Defies his foe with a fell spit,
To wade through death to meet with it;
Then in his self the lymbeck turns,
And his elixir'd poyson urns.
Arachne, once the fear oth' maid<82.1>
Coelestial, thus unto her pray'd:
Heaven's blew-ey'd daughter, thine own mother!
The Python-killing Sun's thy brother.
Oh! thou, from gods that didst descend,
With a poor virgin to contend,
Shall seed of earth and hell ere be
A rival in thy victorie?
Pallas assents: for now long time
And pity had clean rins'd her crime;
When straight she doth with active fire
Her many legged foe inspire.
Have you not seen a charact<82.2> lie
A great cathedral in the sea,
Under whose Babylonian walls
A small thin frigot almshouse stalls?
So in his slime the toad doth float
And th' spyder by, but seems his boat.
And now the naumachie<82.3> begins;
Close to the surface her self spins:
Arachne, when her foe lets flye
A broad