Nevertheless, even here he seemed to be under no distress.  At length they asked him the reason.  The wretch then candidly acknowledged, that hell itself had no torments for him, compared with those which suspicion had given him on earth.

The sages of hell laid their heads together at this news.  Amelioration of his lot on the part of a sinner was not to be thought of in a place of eternal punishment; so they called a parliament together, the result of which was an unanimous conclusion, that the man should be sent back to earth, and consigned to the torments of suspicion for ever.

He went; and the earthly fiend re-entered his being anew with a subtlety so incorporate, that their two natures were identified, and he became SUSPICION ITSELF.  Fruits are thus engrafted on wild stocks.  One colour thus becomes the parent of many, when the painter takes a portion of this and of that from his palette in order to imitate flesh.

The new being took up his abode on a rock by the sea-shore, a thousand feet high, girt all about with mouldering crags, which threatened every instant to fall.  It had a fortress on the top, the approach to which was by seven drawbridges, and seven gates, each locked up more strongly than the other; and here, now this moment, constantly thinking Death is upon him, Suspicion lives in everlasting terror.  He is alone.  He is ever watching.  He cries out from the battlements, to see that the guards are awake below, and never does he sleep day or night.  He wears mail upon mail, and mail again, and feels the less safe the more he puts on; and is always altering and strengthening everything on gate, and on barricado, and on ditch, and on wall.  And do whatever he will, he never seems to have done enough.

* * * * *

Great poet, and good man, Ariosto! your terrors are better than Dante’s; for they warn, as far as warning can do good, and they neither afflict humanity nor degrade God.

Spenser has imitated this sublime piece of pleasantry; for, by a curious intermixture of all which the mind can experience from such a fiction, pleasant it is in the midst of its sublimity,—­laughable with satirical archness, as well as grand and terrible in the climax.  The transformation in Spenser is from a jealous man into Jealousy.  His wife has gone to live with the Satyrs, and a villain has stolen his money.  The husband, in order to persuade his wife to return, steals into the horde of the Satyrs, by mixing with their flock of goats,—­as Norandino does in a passage imitated from Homer by Ariosto.  The wife flatly refuses to do any such thing, and the poor wretch is obliged to steal out again.

  “So soon as he the prison door did pass,
    He ran as fast as both his feet could bear,
    And never looked who behind him was,
    Nor scarcely who before.  Like as a bear
    That creeping close among the hives, to rear
    An honeycomb, the wakeful dogs espy,
    And him assailing, sore his carcass tear,
    That hardly he away with life does fly,
  Nor stays till safe himself he see from jeopardy.