Our Mandeville, Primaleon, Don Quixote,
Great Amadis, or Huon, travelled not
As I have done, or been where I have been,
Or heard and seen, what I have heard and seen;
Nor Britain's Odcombe (Zany, brave Ulysses)
In all his ambling, saw the like as this is.
I was in (would I could describe it well)
A dark, light, pleasant, profitable hell,
And as by water I was wafted in,
I thought that I in Charon's boat had been,
But being at the entrance landed thus,
Three men there (instead of Cerberus)
Conveyed me in, in each one hand a light
To guide us in that vault of endless night,
There young and old with glim'ring candles burning
Dig, delve, and labour, turning and returning,
Some in a hole with baskets and with bags,
Resembling furies, or infernal hags:
There one like Tantalus feeding, and there one,
Like Sisyphus he rolls the restless stone.
Yet all I saw was pleasure mixed with profit,
Which proved it to be no tormenting Tophet:[1]
- ↑ Tophet.—The Hebrew name for Hell,
Netherlands; Newly digested in the hungary aire of Odcombe in the county of Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling members of this Kingdome, &c. London, printed by W. S., Anno Domini 1611." Taylor had an especial grudge against Coryat, for having had influence enough to procure his "Laugh and be Fat"—directed against the traveller—to be burned; and that he never failed to "feed fat the ancient grudge," may be seen in the many pieces of ridicule levelled at the author of the "Crudities," even after his death.
