“a great froste in a water rounes
And after a bytter wynde comes
Which gothe through the soules with eyre;
Fends with pokes pulle theyr flesshe ysondre,
They fight and curse, and eche on other wonder.”
We cannot here enter, however, into the mass of mystic details respecting “the soul’s dread journey[734] by caverns and rocky paths and weary plains, over steep and slippery mountains, by frail bank or giddy bridge, across gulfs or rushing rivers, abiding the fierce onset of the soul-destroyer or the doom of the stern guardian of the other world.” Few subjects, indeed, have afforded greater scope for the imagination than the hereafter of the human soul, and hence, as might be expected, numerous myths have been invented in most countries to account for its mysterious departure in the hour of death, from the world of living men to its unseen, unknown home in the distant land of spirits.
Shakespeare several times uses the word “limbo” in a general signification for hell, as in “Titus Andronicus” (iii. 1):
“As far from help as limbo is from bliss.”
And in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (v. 3), Parolles says: “for, indeed, he was mad for her, and talked of Satan, and of limbo, and of furies, and I know not what.” In “Henry VIII.” (v. 4), “in Limbo Patrum” is jocularly put for a prison; and, again, in “Comedy of Errors” (iv. 2), “he’s in Tartar limbo.” “According to the schoolmen, Limbus Patrum was the place, bordering on hell, where the souls of the patriarchs and saints of the Old Testament remained till the death of Christ, who, descending into hell, set them free.”[735]
One of the punishments invented of old for the covetous and avaricious, in hell, was to have melted gold poured down their throats, to which allusion is made by Flaminius, in “Timon of Athens” (iii. 1), who, denouncing Lucullus for his mean insincerity towards his friend Timon, exclaims, on rejecting the bribe offered him to tell his master that he had not seen him:
“May these add to the number that may scald thee!
Let molten coin be thy damnation.”
In the “Shepherd’s Calendar,” Lazarus declares himself to have seen covetous men and women in hell dipped in caldrons of molten lead. Malone quotes the following from an old black-letter ballad of “The Dead Man’s Song:”
“Ladles full of melted gold
Were poured down their throats.”
Crassus was so punished by the Parthians.[736]