Hudibras, Samuel Butler [types of ebook readers TXT] 📗

Thus virtuous Orsin was endu’d
With learning, conduct, fortitude,
Incomparable: and as the prince
Of poets, Homer, sung long since,
A skilful leech is better far
Than half an hundred men of war,
So he appear’d; and by his skill,
No less than dint of sword, could kill.

The gallant Bruin march’d next him,
With visage formidably grim,
And rugged as a Saracen,
Or Turk of Mahomet’s own kin;
Clad in a mantle della guerre
Of rough impenetrable fur;
And in his nose, like Indian king,
He wore, for ornament, a ring;
About his neck a threefold gorget,
As rough as trebled leathern target;
Armed, as heralds, cant, and langued;
Or, as the vulgar say, sharp-fanged.
For as the teeth in beasts of prey
Are swords, with which they fight in fray;
So swords, in men of war, are teeth,
Which they do eat their vittle with.
He was by birth, some authors write,
A Russian; some, a Muscovite;
And ’mong the Cossacks had been bred,59
Of whom we in diurnals read,
That serve to fill up pages here,
As with their bodies ditches there.
Scrimansky was his cousin-german,
With whom he serv’d, and fed on vermin;
And when these fail’d, he’d suck his claws,
And quarter himself upon his paws.
And tho’ his countrymen, the Huns,60
Did stew their meat between their bums
And th’ horses backs o’er which they straddle,
And ev’ry man eat up his saddle;
He was not half so nice as they,
But eat it raw when ’t came in’s way.
He had trac’d countries far and near,
More than Le Blanc, the traveller;
Who writes, he spous’d in India,
Of noble house, a lady gay,61
And got on her a race of worthies,
As stout as any upon earth is.
Full many a fight for him between
Talgol and Orsin oft had been
Each striving to deserve the crown
Of a sav’d citizen; the one
To guard his bear; the other fought
To aid his dog; both made more stout
By sev’ral spurs of neighbourhood,
Church-fellow-membership, and blood;
But Talgol, mortal foe to cows,
Never got aught of him but blows;
Blows hard and heavy, such as he
Had lent, repaid with usury.

Yet Talgol was of courage stout,
And vanquish’d oft’ner than he fought:
Inur’d to labour, sweat and toil,
And like a champion shone with oil.
Right many a widow his keen blade,
And many fatherless had made.
He many a boar and huge dun-cow
Did, like another Guy, o’erthrow;
But Guy with him in fight compar’d,
Had like the boar or dun-cow far’d.
With greater troops of sheep h’ had fought
Than Ajax or bold Don Quixote:
And many a serpent of fell kind,
With wings before and stings behind,
Subdu’d, as poets say, long agone,
Bold Sir George, St. George, did the dragon.
Nor engine, nor device polemic,
Disease, nor doctor epidemic,
Tho’ stor’d with deletory med’cines,
(Which whosoever took is dead since,)
E’er sent so vast a colony
To both the underworlds as he:
For he was of that noble trade
That demi-gods and heroes made,
Slaughter and knocking on the head,
The trade to which they all were bred;
And is, like others, glorious when
’Tis great and large, but base if mean:
The former rides in triumph for it,
The latter in a two-wheel’d chariot,
For daring to profane a thing
So sacred with vile bungling.

Next these the brave Magnano came;
Magnano, great in martial fame.
Yet when with Orsin he wag’d fight,
’Tis sung, he got but little by ’t.
Yet he was fierce as forest boar,
Whose spoils upon his back he wore,
As thick as Ajax’ seven-fold shield,
Which o’er his brazen arms he held:
But brass was feeble to resist
The fury of his armed fist;
Nor could the hardest ir’n hold out
Against his blows, but they would through’t.

In magic he was deeply read
As he that made the brazen head;
Profoundly skill’d in the black art,
As English Merlin for his heart;62
But far more skilful in the spheres
Than he was at the sieve and shears.
He could transform himself in colour
As like the devil as a collier;
As like as hypocrites in show
Are to true saints, or crow to crow.
Of warlike engines he was author,
Devis’d for quick dispatch of slaughter:
The cannon, blunderbuss, and saker,
He was th’ inventor of, and maker:
The trumpet, and the kettle-drum,
Did both from his invention come.
He was the first that e’er did teach
To make, and how to stop, a breach.
A lance he bore with iron pike;
Th’ one half would thrust, the other strike;
And when their forces he had join’d,
He scorn’d to turn his parts behind.

He Trulla lov’d; Trulla, more bright
Than burnish’d armour of her knight:
A bold virago, stout and tall
As Joan of France, or English Mall,63
Thro’ perils both of wind and limb,
Thro’ thick and thin, she follow’d him,
In ev’ry adventure h’ undertook,
And never him or it forsook:
At breach of wall, or hedge surprise,
She shar’d i’ th’ hazard and the prize:
At beating quarters up, or forage,
Behav’d herself with matchless courage;
And laid about in fight more busily
Than the Amazonian dame Penthesile.64

And though some critics here cry shame,
And say our authors are to blame,
That (spite of all philosophers,
Who hold no females stout but bears,
And heretofore did so abhor
That women should pretend to war,
They would not suffer the stoutest dame
To swear by Hercules’s name)65
Make feeble ladies in their works,
To fight like termagants and Turks;
To lay their native arms aside,
Their modesty, and ride astride;
To run a-tilt at men, and wield
Their naked tools in open field;
As stout Armida, bold Thalestris,66
And she that would have been the mistress
Of Gondibert;67 but he