all his ancestors and the woman be come of kings or of emperors, or if the man be come of never so high kin and the woman of never so low kin, if they love one another, but he sinneth in Holy Church against God and his deed, and therefore he shall have much pain and tribulations.”  Being assoiled of this crying sin, St. John takes William to a fire “grete and styngkyng,” in which he sees people burning in their gay clothes.  “I saw some with collars of gold about their necks, and some of silver, and some men I saw with gay girdles of silver and gold, and harnessed with horns about their necks, some with mo jagges on their clothes than whole cloth, others full of jingles and bells of silver all over set, and some with long pokes on their sleeves, and women with gowns trailing behind them a long space, and some with chaplets on their heads of gold and pearls and other precious stones.  And I looked on him that I saw first in pain, and saw the collars and gay girdles and baldrics burning, and the fiends dragging him by two fingermits.  And I saw the jagges that men were clothed in turn all to adders, to dragons, and to toads, and ‘many other orrible bestes,’ sucking them, and biting them, and stinging them with all their might, and through every jingle I saw fiends smite burning nails of fire into their flesh.  I also saw fiends drawing down the skin of their shoulders like to pokes, and cutting them off, and drawing them to the heads of those they cut them from, all burning as fire.  And then I saw the women that had side trails behind them, and the side trails cut off by the fiends and burned on their head; and some took of the cutting all burning and stopped therewith their mouths, their noses, and their ears.  I saw also their gay chaplets of gold and pearls and precious stones turned into nails of iron, burning, and fiends with burning hammers smiting them into their heads.”  These were proud and vain people.  Then he saw another fire, where the fiends were putting out people’s eyes and pouring molten brass and lead into the sockets, and tearing off their arms and the nails of their feet and hands, and soldering them on again.  This was the doom of swearers.  William saw other fires wherein the devils were executing tortures varied and horrible on their unfortunate victims.  We need follow him no further.

At the end of the fifteenth century the Purgatory in Lough Derg was destroyed by orders of the Pope, on hearing the report of a monk of Eymstadt in Holland, who had visited it, and had satisfied himself that there was nothing in it more remarkable than in any ordinary cavern.  The Purgatory was closed on St. Patrick’s Day, 1497; but the belief in it was not so speedily banished from popular superstition.  Calderon made it the subject of one of his dramas; and it became the subject of numerous popular chap-books in France and Spain, where during last century it occupied in the religious belief of the people precisely the same position which is assumed by the marvelous visions of heaven and hell sold by hawkers in England at the present day.