When wives their sexes shift, like hares,[1] 705
And ride their husbands like night-mares;
And they, in mortal battle vanquish'd,
Are of their charter disenfranchis'd,
And by the right of war, like gills,[2]
Condemn'd to distaff, horns, and wheels:[3] 710
For when men by their wives are cow'd,
Their horns of course are understood.
Quoth Hudibras, Thou still giv'st sentence
Impertinently, and against sense:
'Tis not the least disparagement 715
To be defeated by th' event,
Nor to be beaten by main force;
That does not make a man the worse,
Altho' his shoulders, with battoon,
Be claw'd, and cudgell'd to some tune; 720
A tailor's 'prentice has no hard
Measure, that's bang'd with a true yard;
But to turn tail, or run away,
And without blows give up the day;
Or to surrender ere the assault, 725
That's no man's fortune, but his fault;
And renders men of honour less
Than all th' adversity of success;
And only unto such this show
Of horns and petticoats is due. 730
There is a lesser profanation,
Like that the Romans call'd ovation:[4]
- ↑ Many have been the vulgar errors concerning the sexes of hares, some of the elder naturalists pretending that they changed them annually, others that hares were hermaphrodite. See Browne's Vulgar Errors, b. iii. c. 17. But our poet here chiefly means to ridicule Dr Bulwer's Artificial Changeling, p. 407, who cites the female patriarch of Greece, and Pope Joan of Rome.
- ↑ Gill, in the Scotch and Irish dialect, a girl; in Wright's Glossary one of the significations is, "a wanton wench;" and so Ben Jonson, in his Gipsies Metamorphosed, uses it, "Give you all your fill,—each Jack with his Gill."
- ↑ "Wheels" here are spinning wheels; and not those of timber-gills or drays.
- ↑ At the greater triumph the Romans sacrificed an ox; at the lesser a sheep. Hence the name ovation.
