138
HUDIBRAS.
[PART II.
Diurnals writ for regulation
Of lying, to inform the nation,[1]
And by their public use to bring down
The rate of whetstones in the kingdom.[2]60
About her neck a packet-mail.
Fraught with advice, some fresh, some stale,
Of men that walk'd when they were dead,
And cows of monsters brought to bed:[3]
Of hail-stones big as pullets' eggs,65
And puppies whelp'd with twice two legs:[4]
A blazing star seen in the west,
By six or seven men at least.
Two trumpets she does sound at once,[5]
But both of clean contrary tones; 70
But whether both with the same wind,
Or one before, and one behind,
We know not, only this can tell,
The one sounds vilely, th' other well;
And therefore vulgar authors name 75
Th' one Good, th' other Evil Fame.
- ↑ The newspapers of those times, called Mercuries and Diurnals, were characterised by many of the contemporary writers as lying journals. Each party had its Mercuries: there was Mercurius Rusticus, and Mercurius Aulicus.
- ↑ Whetstone is a proverbial term, denoting an excitement to lying, or a subject that gave a man an opportunity of whetting his wit upon another. See Ray, in Handbook of Proverbs, p. 60. Thus Shakspeare makes Celia reply to Rosalind upon the entry of the Clown: "Fortune hath sent this natural for our whetstone; for always the dulness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits." Lying for the whetstone appears to have been a jocular custom. In Lupton's "Too good to be true" occur these lines: "Omen. And what shall he gain that gets the victory in lying? Syilla. He shall have a silver whetstone for his labours." See a full account in Brand's Popular Antiquities (Bohn's edit.), vol. iii. p. 389—393.
- ↑ Some stories of the kind are found in Morton's History of Northamptonshire, p. 447; Knox's History of the Reformation in Scotland; and Philosophical Transactions, xxvi. p. 310.
- ↑ To make this story as wonderful as the rest, we ought to read thrice two, or twice four legs.
- ↑ Chaucer makes Æolus, an attendant on Fame, blow the clarion of laud, and the clarion of slander, alternately, accoding to her directions; and in Pope's Temple of Fame, she has the trumpet of eternal praise, and the trumpet of slander.
