A demon from Spenser

Thanks to Eva Davis from Librivox for the recording, which is from her version of Elizabethan Demonology. Statistics eventually.

Spenser has clothed with horror this conception of the appearance of a fiend, just as he has enshrined in beauty the belief in the guardian angel. It is worthy of remark that he describes the devil as dwelling beneath the altar of an idol in a heathen temple. Prince Arthur strikes the image thrice with his sword—

      “And the third time, out of an hidden shade,
      There forth issewed from under th’ altar’s smoake
      A dreadfull feend with fowle deformèd looke,
      That stretched itselfe as it had long lyen still;
      And her long taile and fethers strongly shooke,
      That all the temple did with terrour fill;
    Yet him nought terrifide that fearèd nothing ill.

      “An huge great beast it was, when it in length
      Was stretchèd forth, that nigh filled all the place,
      And seemed to be of infinite great strength;
      Horrible, hideous, and of hellish race,
      Borne of the brooding of Echidna base,
      Or other like infernall Furies kinde,
      For of a maide she had the outward face
      To hide the horrour which did lurke behinde
    The better to beguile whom she so fond did finde.

      “Thereto the body of a dog she had,
      Full of fell ravin and fierce greedinesse;
      A lion’s clawes, with power and rigour clad
      To rende and teare whatso she can oppresse;
      A dragon’s taile, whose sting without redresse
      Full deadly wounds whereso it is empight,
      And eagle’s wings for scope and speedinesse
      That nothing may escape her reaching might,
    Whereto she ever list to make her hardy flight.”