220
HUDIBRAS.
[PART II.
Whate'er he labour'd to appear,
His understanding still was clear;[1]
Yet none a deeper knowledge boasted,
Since old Hodge Bacon, and Bob Grosted.[2]
Th' intelligible world he knew,[3] 225
And all men dream on't, to be true,
That in this world there's not a wart
That has not there a counterpart;
Nov can there, on the face of ground,
An individual beard be found, 230
That has not in that foreign nation
A fellow of the self-same fashion;
So cut, so colour'd, and so curl'd,
As those are in th' inferior world.
He'd read Dee's prefaces before 235
The Devil, and Euclid o'er and o'er;[4]
And all th' intrigues 'twixt him and Kelly,
Lescus and th' emperor, would tell ye:[5]
- ↑ Clear, that is, empty.
- ↑ Roger Bacon was a Franciscan friar, who flourished in the thirteenth century, and was commonly regarded as a conjurer or practitioner of the black art, on account of his knowledge of natural science and philosophy. His Opus Majus is one of the most wonderful books of the times in which he lived. He was acquainted with the composition of gunpowder, and seems to have anticipated some of the great discoveries of later ages. Robert Grostête, bishop of Lincoln, a contemporary of Bacon, was a man of great learning, considering the times, and was declared to be a magician by the ignorant ecclesiastics. He distinguished himself by resisting the aggressions of the Papacy on the liberties of the English Church, for which he incurred the anathemas of Pope Innocent IV.
- ↑ The intelligible world was the model or prototype of the visible world. See P. i. c. i. v. 536, and note.
- ↑ Dr John Dee, the reputed magician, was born in London, 1527, and educated at Cambridge as a clergyman of the English Church. He enjoyed great fame during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I., by his knowledge in mathematics; Tycho Brahe gives him the title of præstantissimus mathematicus, and Camden calls him nobilis mathematicus. He wrote, among other things, a preface to Euclid, and to Billingsley's Geometry, to which Butler apparently alludes. He began early to have the reputation of holding intercourse with the Devil, and on an occasion when he was absent, the populace broke into his house and destroyed the greater part of his valuable library and museum, valued at several thousand pounds.
- ↑ Kelly was an apothecary at Worcester, and Dee's chief assistant, his seer or "skryer" (that is, medium), as he called him. A learned Pole, Al-
