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54
HUDIBRAS.
[PART I.
Right many a widow his keen blade,
And many fatherless, had made.
He many a boar and huge dun-cow 305
Did, like another Guy, o'erthrow;[1]
But Guy, with him in fight compared,
Had like the boar or dun-cow fared.
With greater troops of sheep h' had fought
Than Ajax, or bold Don Quixote;[2] 310
And many a serpent of fell kind,
With wings before, and stings behind,[3]a
Subdued; as poets say, long agone,
Bold Sir George St George did the dragon.[4]
Nor engine, nor device polemic, 315
Disease, nor doctor epidemic,[5]
Tho' stored with deletery med'cines,
Which whosoever took is dead since,
E'er sent so vast a colony
To both the under worlds as he.[6] 320
- ↑ Guy, Earl of Warwick, one of whose valiant exploits was overcoming the dun-cow at Dunsmore-heath, in Warwickshire.
- ↑ Ajax, when mad with rage for having failed to obtain the armour of Achilles, attacked and slew a flock of sheep, mistaking them for the Grecian princes who had decided against him. In like manner Don Quixote encountered a flock of sheep, and imagined they were the giant Alifanfaron of Taprobana.
- ↑ Meaning the flies, wasps, and hornets, which prey upon the butchers' meat, and were killed by the valiant Talgol.
- ↑ Sir George, because tradition makes him a soldier as well as a saint. All heroes in romance have the appellation of Sir, as Sir Belianis of Greece, Sir Palmerin, &c. But there was a real Sir George St George, who in February, 1643, was made commissioner for the government of Connaught; and it is not improbable that this coincidence of names might strike the playful imagination of Mr Butler. It is whimsical too, that General George Monk (afterwards Sir George), in a collection of loyal songs, is said to have slain a most cruel dragon, meaning the Rump parliament. Or perhaps the poet might mean to ridicule the presbyterians, who refused even to call the apostles Peter and Paul saints, but in mockery called them Sir Peter, Sir Paul, &c.
- ↑ There is humour in joining the epithet epidemic to the doctor as well as the disease, intimating that there is no condition of the air more dangerous than the vicinity of a quack.
- ↑ Virgil, in his sixth Æneid, describes both the Elysian Fields and Tartarus as below, and not far asunder.
