A Babylonish dialect,
Which learned pedants much affect.
It was a parti-colour'd dress 95
Of patch'd and pie-bald languages;
'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin,
Like fustian heretofore on satin.[1]
It had an odd promiscuous tone,
As if h' had talk'd three parts in one; 100
Which made some think, when he did gabble,
Th' had heard three labourers of Babel;[2]
Or Cerberus himself pronounce
A leash of languages at once.
This he as volubly would vent 105
As if his stock would ne'er be spent:
And truly, to support that charge,
He had supplies as vast and large;
For he could coin, or counterfeit
New words, with little or no wit; 110
Words so debas'd and hard, no stone
Was hard enough to touch them on.
And when with hasty noise he spoke 'em,
The ignorant for current took 'em;
That had the orator, who once 115
Did fill his mouth with pebble stones[3]
When he harangued, but known his phrase,
He would have used no other ways.
In Mathematics he was greater
Than Tycho Brahe, or Erra Pater:[4] 120
- ↑ Slashed sleeves and hose may be seen in the pictures of Dobson, Vandyke, and others; they were coarse fustian pinked, or cut into holes, that the satin might appear through it.
- ↑ Diodorus Siculus mentions some southern islands, the inhabitants of which, having their tongues divided, were capable of speaking two different languages at once, and Rabelais, in his account of the monster Hearsay (see Works, Bohn's Edit. v. 2, p. 45), observes, that his mouth was slit up to his ears, and in it were seven tongues, each of them cleft into seven parts, and that he talked with all the seven at once, of different matters, and in divers languages.
- ↑ Demosthenes.
- ↑ William Lilly, the famous astrologer of those times. The House of Commons had so great a regard to his predictions, that the author of Mercurius Pragmaticus (No. 20) styles the members the sons of Erra Pater, an old astrologer, of whose predictions John Taylor, the water poet, makes mention.
