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CANTO I.]
HUDIBRAS.
7
He'd prove a buzzard is no fowl,
And that a Lord may be an owl,
A calf an Alderman,[1] a goose a Justice,[2] 75
And rooks, Committee-men and Trustees.[3]
He'd run in debt by disputation,
And pay with ratiocination.
All this by syllogism, true
In mood and figure, he would do. 80
For Rhetoric, he could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope;
And when he happen'd to break off
I' th' middle of his speech, or cough,[4]
H' had hard words,ready to show why,[5] 85
And tell what rules he did it by;
Else, when with greatest art he spoke,
You'd think he talk'd like other folk,
For all a Rhetorician's rules
Teach nothing but to name his tools. 90
But when he pleased to show 't, his speech
In loftiness of sound was rich;
- ↑ Such was Alderman Pennington, who sent a person to Newgate for singing what he called a malignant psalm
- ↑ After the declaration of No more addresses to the king, they who before were not above the condition of ordinary constables now became justices of the peace. Chelmsford, at the beginning of the rebellion, was governed by two tailors, two cobblers, two pedlars, and a tinker.
- ↑ A rook is supposed to devour the grain ; hence, by a figure, applied to the committee-men, who, under the authority of parliament, harassed and oppressed the country, devouring, in an arbitrary manner, the property of those they did not like. An ordinance was passed in 1649, for the sale of
the royal lands, to pay the army; the common soldiers purchasing by regiments, like corporations, and having trustees for the whole. These trustees often purchased the soldiers' shares at a very small price, and cheated both officers and soldiers, by detaining the trust estates for their own use. - ↑ The preachers of those days looked upon coughing and hemming as ornaments of speech; and when they printed their sermons, noted in the margin where the preacher coughed or hemm'd. This practice was not confined to England, for Olivier Maillard, a Cordelier, and famous preacher, printed a sermon at Brussels in the year 1500, and marked in the margin where the preacher hemm'd once or twice, or coughed.
- ↑ Amongst the "hard words" of the rhetoricians ridiculed here, were such as hyperbaton, ephonesis, asyndeton, aporia, homœosis, hyperbole, hypomone, apodioxis, anadiplosis, &c. &c.; for the meanings of which, see Webster's Dictionary.
