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!1

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.

THE TOAD AND SPYDER.

A DUELL.

PON a day, when the Dog-star
Unto the world proclaim'd a war,

And poyson bark'd from his black throat,

And from his jaws infection shot,

Under a deadly hen-bane shade

With slime infernal mists are made,

'Here equivalent to ranter, and used for the sake of the

metre.

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' maid1

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.

It will be seen that this poem partly turns on the mythological tale of Arachne and Minerva, and the metamorphosis of the former by the angry goddess into a spider (ápáxvn).

i. e. carak, or carrick, as the word is variously spelled. This large kind of ship was much used by the Greeks and Venetians during the middle ages, and also by other nations.

Under whose Babylonian walls

A small thin frigot almshouse stalls?
So in his slime the toad doth float

1

And th' spyder by, but seems his boat.
And now the naumachie 1 begins;
Close to the surface her self spins:
Arachne, when her foe lets flye
A broad-side of his breath too high,
That's over-shot, the wisely-stout,
Advised maid doth tack about;

And now her pitchy barque doth sweat,
Chaf'd in her own black fury wet;
Lasie and cold before, she brings
New fires to her contracted stings,
And with discolour'd spumes doth blast
The herbs that to their center hast.
Now to the neighb'ring henbane top
Arachne hath her self wound up,
And thence, from its dilated leaves,
By her own cordage downwards weaves,
And doth her town of foe attack,2

And storms the rampiers 3 of his back;
Which taken in her colours spread,

March to th' citadel of's head.

The poet rather awkwardly sustains his simile, and employs, in expressing a contest between the toad and the spider, a term signifying a naval battle, or, at least, a fight between two ships.

2 Lovelace's fondness for military similitudes is constantly standing in the way, and marring his attempts at poetical imagery.

A form of rampart, sanctioned by Dryden.

Now as in witty torturing Spain,
The brain is vext to vex the brain,
Where hereticks bare heads are arm'd
In a close helm, and in it charm'd
An overgrown and meagre rat,
That peece-meal nibbles himself fat;
So on the toads blew-checquer'd scull
The spider gluttons her self full.
And vomiting her Stygian seeds,

Her
poyson on his poyson feeds.
Thus the invenom'd toad, now grown
Big with more poyson than his own,
Doth gather all his pow'rs, and shakes
His stormer in's disgorged lakes;
And wounded now, apace crawls on
To his next plantane surgeon,1

With whose rich balm no sooner drest,
But purged is his sick swoln breast;
And as a glorious combatant,
That only rests awhile to pant,

Then with repeated strength and scars,
That smarting fire him new to wars,
Deals blows that thick themselves prevent,
As they would gain the time he spent.

So the disdaining angry toad,
That calls but a thin useless load,
His fatal feared self comes back
With unknown venome fill'd to crack.

1 Medicinal herb or plant.

Th' amased spider, now untwin'd,

Hath crept up, and her self new lin'd

With fresh salt foams and mists, that blast
The ambient air as they past.

And now me thinks a Sphynx's wing

I pluck, and do not write, but sting;
With their black blood my pale inks blent,1
Gall's but a faint ingredient.

The pol'tick toad doth now withdraw,
Warn'd, higher in campania.2

There wisely doth, intrenched deep,
His body in a body keep,
And leaves a wide and open pass
T' invite the foe up to his jaws,
Which there within a foggy blind
With fourscore fire-arms were lin❜d.
The gen'rous active spider doubts
More ambuscadoes than redoubts;
So within shot she doth pickear,3
Now gall's the flank, and now the rear;
As that the toad in's own dispite

4

Must change the manner of his fight,
Who, like a glorious general,

With one home-charge lets fly at all.

Blended.

2 Campania may signify, in the present passage, either a field or the country generally, or a plain. It is a clumsy expression.

3 In the sense in which it is here used this word seems to be peculiar to Lovelace. To pickear, or pickeer, means to skirmish. 4 So that.