hell-broth

It is delightful to smell the perfume of a fact in the hell-broth of his perjury.

The witches in ‘Macbeth’—those weird sisters who met at midnight upon the blasted heath, and in their caldron brewed so deadly a ‘hell-broth’—partake of the dignity of the poet’s genius, and belong to the vast ideal world of his imagination.

They are partly heathen, partly Christian; partly classical, partly Teutonic—a strange and unwholesome compound, as ‘thick and slab’ as the hell-broth mixed by the hags on ‘the blasted heath’!

She cooked this up in Court, and the whole business was very suggestive of the making of the hell-broth of the witches in "Macbeth," only that perhaps the Court of Law did not give a striking representation of the "blasted heath."

At last the mess is swept up, the few recognizable fragments of metal are put aside for further use, another furnace is built, and the indefatigable Canon concocts a fresh hell-broth, sweeping away all past failures with the incurable optimism of a monomaniac, “There was defect in somewhat, well I wot.”