244
HUDIBRAS.
[PART II.
Write wittier dances, quainter shows, 765
Or fight with more ingenious blows?
Or does the man i' th' moon look big,
And wear a huger periwig,
Show in his gait or face more tricks,
Than our own native lunaticks?[1] 770
But, if w' outdo him here at home,
What good of your design can come?
As wind, i' th' hypocondres pent,[2]
Is but a blast, if downward sent;
But if it upward chance to fly, 775
Becomes new light and prophecy;[3]
So when our speculations tend
Above their just and useful end,
Altho' they promise strange and great
Discoveries of things far fet, 780
- ↑ These and the foregoing lines were a satire upon the gait, dress, and carriage of the fops and beaux of those days. Long perukes had some years previously been introduced in France, and in our poet's time had come into great vogue in England.
- ↑ In the belly, under the short ribs. These lines were cleverly turned into Latin by Dr Harmer.
Sic hypocondriacis inclusa meatibus aura
Desinet in crepitum, si fertur prona per alvum;
Sed si summa petat, mentisque invaserit arcem
Divinus furor est, et conscia flamma futuri.
The subject seems to have afforded scope, or rather "given vent," to the wit of the day. In Dornavii Amphitheatrum Sapientiæ joco-seriæ, Hanov. 1619, are several early pieces "de peditu," and a merry English writer gives the following joco-scientific definition of it. "A nitro-aërial vapour, exhaled from an adjacent pond of stagnant water, of a saline nature, and rarefied and sublimed into the nose of a microscopical alembic by the general heat of a stercorarius balneum, with a strong empyreuma, and forced through the posteriors by the compressive power of the compulsive faculty." - ↑ New light was a phrase coined at that time, and used ever since for any new opinion in religion. In the north of Ireland, where the dissenters are chiefly divided into two sects, they are distinguished as the old and the new lights. The old lights are such as rigidly adhere to the old Calvinistic doctrine; and the new lights are those who have adopted the more modern latitudinarian opinions; these are frequently hostile to each other, as their predecessors the Presbyterians and Independents were in the time of the Civil Wars.
