To let them breathe awhile, and then 165
Cry whoop, and set them on again.
As Romulus a wolf did rear,
So he was dry-nursed by a bear,[1]
That fed him with the purchased prey
Of many a fierce and bloody fray; 170
Bred up, where discipline most rare is,
In military garden Paris:[2]
For soldiers heretofore did grow
In gardens, just as weeds do now,
Until some splay-foot politicians 175
T' Apollo offer'd up petitions,[3]
For licensing a new invention
They'd found out, of an antique engine
To root out all the weeds, that grow
In public gardens, at a blow, 180
And leave th' herbs standing. Quoth Sir Sun,[4]
My friends, that is not to be done.
Not done? quoth Statesmen: Yes, an't please ye,
When 'tis once known you'll say 'tis easy.
Why then let's know it, quoth Apollo. 185
We'll beat a drum, and they'll all follow.
- ↑ That is, maintained by the profits derived by the exhibition of his bear. It probably alludes also, as Grey suggests, to Orson (in the story of Valentine and Orson), who was suckled by a bear.
- ↑ At Paris Garden, in Southwark, near the river-side, there was a circus, long noted for the entertainment of bear-baiting, which was forbidden in the time of the civil wars. The 'military garden' refers to a society instituted by James I., for training soldiers, who used to practise at Paris Garden.
- ↑ The whole passage, here a little inverted, by the satirist's humour, is taken from Boccalini's Advertisement from Parnassus, where the gardeners entreat Apollo, who had invented drums and trumpets by which princes could destroy their wild and rebellious subjects, to teach them some such easy method of destroying weeds.
- ↑ Apollo, after the fashion of chivalry, is here designated "Sir Sun." The expression is used by Sir Philip Sydney in Pembroke's Arcadia.
holding the dogs by the tails. The bitterness of the satire may be accounted for by the poet's having married a widow, whom he thought possessed of a great fortune; but being placed on bad security, perhaps through the unskilfulness or roguery of a lawyer, it was lost. In his MS. Common-place Book he says the lawyer never ends a suit, but prunes it, that it may grow the faster, and yield a greater increase of strife.
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