296
HUDIBRAS.
[PART III.
Which ralliers in their wit or drink
Do rather wheedle with, than think. 760
Man was not man in paradise,
Until he was created twice,
And had his better half, his bride,
Carv'd from th' original, his side,[1]
T' amend his natural defects, 765
And perfect his recruited sex;
Enlarge his breed, at once, and lessen
The pains and labour of increasing,
By changing them for other cares,
As by his dried-up paps appears. 770
His body, that stupendous frame,
Of all the world the anagram,[2]
Is of two equal parts compact,
In shape and symmetry exact.
Of which the left and female side 775
Is to the manly right a bride,[3]
Do rather wheedle with, than think. 760
Man was not man in paradise,
Until he was created twice,
And had his better half, his bride,
Carv'd from th' original, his side,[1]
T' amend his natural defects, 765
And perfect his recruited sex;
Enlarge his breed, at once, and lessen
The pains and labour of increasing,
By changing them for other cares,
As by his dried-up paps appears. 770
His body, that stupendous frame,
Of all the world the anagram,[2]
Is of two equal parts compact,
In shape and symmetry exact.
Of which the left and female side 775
Is to the manly right a bride,[3]
- ↑ Thus Cleveland:Adam, 'till his rib was lost,
Had the sexes thus engrost.
When Providence our sire did cleave,
And out of Adam carved Eve,
Then did man 'bout wedlock treat,
To make his body up complete. - ↑ Anagram means a transposition of the letters of a word by which a new meaning is extracted from it; as in Dr Burney's well-known anagram of Horatio Nelson—Honor est a Nilo. Man is often called the microcosm, or world in miniature, and it is in this sense that Butler describes him.
- ↑ In the Symposium of Plato, Aristophanes, one of the dialogists, relates, that the human species, at its original formation, consisted not only of males and females, but of a third kind, combining both sexes in one. This last species, it is said, having rebelled against Jupiter, was, by way of punishment, completely divided; whence the strong propensity which inclines the separate parts to a reünion, and the assumed origin of love. And since it is hardly possible that the dissevered moieties should stumble upon each other, after they have wandered about the earth, we may, upon the same hypothesis, account for the number of unhappy and disproportionate matches which men daily encounter, by saying that they mistake their proper halves. Moore makes a happy use of this notion in speaking of ballad music before it is wedded to poetry: "A pretty air without words resembles one of those half creatures of Plato, which are described as wandering in search of the remainder of themselves through the world."—National Airs.
husband and wife quarrelling under ground; a situation, he says, not more uncomfortable than that of a married pair continually at variance, since these, if not in fact buried alive, are so virtually.
