208 RETRIBUTIVE TORMENTS. 



Philip of Spain, the great persecutor of the Protestants, are 

 all recorded to have been frightfully distinguished in their 

 deaths, as in their lives, by falling victims to the pedicular 

 disease. The worm of corruption anticipated in her labours, 

 these livers in luxurious palaces were doomed to bear, hidden 

 beneath their royal purple, devouring myriads of that revolting 

 tribe of insects, whose usual localities and accompaniments 

 are hovels, rags, and wretchedness. Rarely as it may seem to 

 harmonize with the grand scheme of providential dispensation 

 to visit temporal crimes by temporal punishments (except, 

 indeed, by those with which they are almost inseparably linked), 

 one can hardly in the above cases help leaning to the popular 

 belief, that the blood-guiltiness of these royal monsters was in 

 an especial manner visited upon them for warning, if not for 

 retribution. 



Various instances are related of another disease, somewhat 

 resembling, though not similar, in which mites, or Acari, 

 lodge beneath the skin. One of these we shall briefly repeat, 

 though often quoted, from Mouffet's ' Theatre of Insects/ 

 because a natural cause is assigned for the infestation there 

 described, such as would seem wanting in the cases of those 

 tormentors tormented, on whom the finger of God was sup- 

 posed to have been supernaturally laid. 



Of " the Lady Penruddocke * our narrator tells us, that 

 Acari, or mites, swarmed in every part of her body, head, eyes, 

 nose, lips, gums, and soles of her feet, tormenting her day and 



