Your pettifoggers damn their souls, 515
To share with knaves in cheating fools:
And merchants, venturing through the main,[1]
Slight pirates, rocks, and horns for gain.
This is the way I advise you to.
Trust me, and see what I will do.520
Quoth she, I should be loth to run
Myself all th' hazard, and you none;
Which must be done, unless some deed
Of yours aforesaid do precede;
Give but yourself one gentle swing[2]525
For trial, and I'll cut the string:
Or give that rev'rend head a maul,
Or two, or three, against a wall;
To show you are a man of mettle,
And I'll engage myself to settle.530
Quoth he, My head's not made of brass,
As Friar Bacon's noddle was;[3]
Nor, like the Indian's skull, so tough,
That, authors say, 'twas musket-proof:[4]
As it had need to be to enter,535
As yet, on any new adventure;
You see what bangs it has endur'd,
That would, before new feats, be cur'd:
- ↑ See Spectator, No. 450.
- ↑ Grey surmises from Hudibras's refusal to comply with this request, that he would by no means have approved an antique game invented by a Thracian tribe, of which we are told by Martinus Scriblerus (book i. ch. 6) that one of the players was hung up, and had a knife given him to cut himself down with; of course, forfeiting his life if he failed.
- ↑ It was one of the legends respecting that great natural philosopher, Roger Bacon, that he had formed a head of brass, which uttered these words, Time is. Sir Thomas Browne, in his Vulgar Errors, book vii. ch. 17, § 7, explains it as a kind of myth regarding "the philosopher's great work"—the making of gold. In Sir Francis Palgrave's "Merchant and Friar," it is no more than the extremity of a tube for conveying messages from one room to another.
- ↑ Blockheads and loggerheads, says Bulwer (Artificial Changeling, p. 42), are in request in Brazil, and helmets are of little use, every one having a natural morion of his head: for the Brazilians' heads, some of them, are as hard as the wood that grows in their country, so that they cannot be broken. See also Purchas's Pilgr. fol. vol. iii. p. 993.
soldier in Tacitus (Annals I. c. 17), seems to have been sensible of some such hardship.
