Boiled with oil, huge tuns which flam'd with pitch."
Beaumonts's Psyche, cant. XXII. v. 69. p. 330. Cambridge, 1702. Folio.
"Torturing hour" is used by Campbell in his Pleasures of Hope, Part I.:
"The martyr smiled beneath avenging power,
And braved the tyrant in his torturing hour."
And, indeed, "sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's child," had used it before any of them:
"Is there no play, to ease the anguish of a torturing hour."
Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V. Sc. 1.
Again, Gray writes in his truly sublime ode, "The Bard:"
"On a rock, whose haughty brow