Last Colon came, bold man of war,[1]
Destined to blows by fatal star;
Right expert in command of horse,
But cruel, and without remorse.
That which of Centaur long ago 445
Was said, and has been wrested to
Some other knights, was true of this:
He and his horse were of a piece.
One spirit did inform them both,
The self-same vigour, fury, wrath; 450
Yet he was much the rougher part,
And always had the harder heart,
Altho' his horse had been of those
That fed on man's flesh, as fame goes.[2]
Strange food for horse! and yet, alas! 455
It may be true, for flesh is grass.[3]
Sturdy he was, and no less able
Than Hercules to cleanse a stable;[4]
As great a drover, and as great
A critic too, in hog or neat. 460
He ripp'd the womb up of his mother,
Dame Tellus,[5] 'cause he wanted fother,
And provender, wherewith to feed
Himself and his less cruel steed.
It was a question, whether he, 465
Or's horse, were of a family
More worshipful; till antiquaries,
After they'd almost pored out their eyes,
- ↑ Ned Perry, an ostler.
- ↑ The horses of Diomedes, king of Thrace, were said to have "been fed with human flesh, and that he himself was ultimately eaten by them, his dead body having been thrown to them by Hercules. The moral, perhaps, may be, that Diomedes was ruined by keeping his horses, as Actæon was said to be devoured by his dogs, because he was ruined by keeping them.
- ↑ A banter on the following passage in Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici: "All flesh is grass, not only metaphorically, but literally: for all those creatures we behold are but the herbs of the field digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in ourselves," &c. See Works (Bohn's Edit. vol. ii. p. 317).
- ↑ Alluding to the fabulous story of Hercules, who cleansed the stables of Augeas, king of Elis, by turning the river Alpheus through them.
- ↑ This means no more than his ploughing the ground. A happy example of the magniloquence which belongs to mock epics.
