It was so difficult to see what kind of effect this dismal purgatory was meant to have on any human soul.

" The old man went away into his imaginary paradise, and Nan into that domestic purgatory on a summer day,the kitchen.

And if there were indeed no way of escape for these victims of sin and misfortune, we might well prefer to draw a veil over the sad scene, and to bury in the ocean of forgetfulness, the very recollection of this earthly purgatory.

She was a Papist in disguise, they cried; her purpose was to clutch the dying soldier's spirit and send it to a non-existent Purgatory, instead of to the Hell it probably deserved.

The ivy-grown English churches (even that of Bebbington, the first that I beheld) were quite as familiar to me, when fresh from home, as the old wooden meeting-house in Salem, which used, on wintry Sabbaths, to be the frozen purgatory of my childhood.

Tell me, gentle DALY, tell; why in the name of all that is intelligent, do you let STOEPEL transform each entr' acte at your theatre into a prolonged purgatory, by the villainous way in which he plays the most execrable music, for the most intolerable periods of time? MATADOR.

Some of the points of variation in their doctrine are as follow:They believe in no separate purgatory; but that almost all men go to hell at their death, and that from time to time, the Archangel Michael descends into that place of torment, in order to deliver men's souls, and to introduce them to paradise, sometimes for the sake of the prayers and meritorious works of their relatives and their priests.

Suffice it, that besides all other possible meanings, Dante himself has told us that his poem has its obvious and literal meaning; that he means a spade by a spade, purgatory by purgatory, and truly and unaffectedly to devote his friends to the infernal regions whenever he does so.