Magnan' led up in this adventure,
And made way for the rest to enter:
For he was skilful in black art,[1]
No less than he that built the fort,990
And with an iron mace laid flat
A breach, which straight all enter'd at,
And in the wooden dungeon found
Crowdero laid upon the ground:
Him they release from durance base, 995
Restored t' his fiddle and his case,
And liberty, his thirsty rage
With luscious veng'ance to assuage;
For he no sooner was at large,
But Trulla straight brought on the charge, 1000
And in the self-same limbo put
The Knight and Squire, where he was shut;
Where leaving them i' th' wretched hole,[2]
Their bangs and durance to condole,
Confin'd and conjur'd into narrow 1005
Enchanted mansion, to know sorrow,
In the same order and array
Which they advanc'd, they march'd away:
But Hudibras, who scorn'd to stoop
To fortune, or be said to droop, 1010
Cheer'd up himself with ends of verse,
And sayings of philosophers.
Quoth he, Th' one half of man, his mind,
Is, sui juris, unconfined,[3]
And cannot be laid by the heels, 1015
Whate'er the other moiety feels.
- ↑ Meaning the tinker Magnano. See Canto ii. 1. 336.
- ↑ In the edition of 1704 it is printed in Hockly hole, a pun on the place where their hocks or ankles were confined. Hockley Hole, or Hockley i' th' Hole, was the name of a place near Clerkenwell Green, resorted to for vulgar diversions. There is an old ballad entitled "Hockley i' th' hole, to the tune of the Fiddler in the Stocks." See Old Ballads, vol. i. p.294.
- ↑ Referring to that distinction in the civil law which separates the jurisdiction over the body from that over the mind; (see Justinian's Institutes, III. tit. 8.)—and perhaps to Spinoza, who says that "knowledge makes us free by destroying the dominion of the passions and the power of external things over ourselves." In the succeeding lines the author shows his learning, by bantering the stoic philosophy; and his wit, by comparing Alexander the Great with Diogenes.
