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All this, without a gloss, or comment,
He could unriddle in a moment,

In proper terms, such as men smatter
When they throw out, and miss the matter.
For his Religion, it was fit

To match his learning and his wit;
'Twas Presbyterian, true blue;*
For he was of that stubborn crew
Of errant saints,† whom all men grant
To be the true Church Militant;
Such as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun ;‡
Decide all controversies by
Infallible artillery;

And prove their doctrine orthodox
By apostolic blows, and knocks;
Call fire, and sword, and desolation,
A godly, thorough Reformation,
Which always must be carried on,
And still be doing, never done;
As if Religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.

from the curse which condemned him to crawl upon his belly. The inference drawn by some commentators is that he had previously gone erect upon his tail.

* Blue was the usual livery of servants-hence, perhaps, it came to be proverbially regarded as the colour of service or fidelity. It was commonly the habit of beadles and other officers :

Came a velvet justice with a long
Great train of blue-coats, twelve or fourteen strong.
DONNE.-Sat. 1.

The expression 'true blue' is found in the old proverb-True blue will never stain.

+ Literally itinerant or wandering saints, who go about on a mission of propagandism-in this instance enforcing their doctrines by fire and sword.

Upon these Cornet Joyce built his faith, when he carried away the King by force from Holdenby: for when his Majesty asked him for a sight of his instructions, Joyce said he should see them presently; and so, drawing up his troop in the inward court, These, sir,' said the Cornet, are my instructions.'-ECHARD.

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A sect, whose chief devotion lies
In odd perverse antipathies;*
In falling out with that or this,
And finding somewhat still amiss;
More peevish, cross, and splenetic,
Than dog distract, or monkey sick.
That with more care keep holy-day
The wrong, than others the right way;†
Compound for sins they are inclined to,
By damning those they have no mind to:
Still so perverse and opposite,

As if they worshipped God for spite.
The self-same thing they will abhor
One way, and long another for.
Free-will they one way disavow,
Another, nothing else allow.
All piety consists therein

In them, in other men all sin.

Rather than fail, they will defy

That which they love most tenderly;

Quarrel with minced-pies, and disparage

Their best and dearest friend-plum-porridge;
Fat pig and goose itself oppose,

And blaspheme custard through the nose.

* A sect whose religion consisted less in the articles in which it believed, than in its opposition to articles held by others. Thus the Presbyterians opposed all the pastimes and amusements of the people, particularly those which had any connexion with the Church: they especially objected to the eating of pies and plum-porridge at Christmas, which they denounced as sinful; and carried their hostility even into matters of costume, such as the mode of dressing hair, and the shape of the dress.

The

The Presbyterians strained their opposition so far as to keep a sort of Lent at Christmas by converting the festival into a fast. crusade against Christmas and its traditional 'good cheer' is thus noticed in one of the ballads of the day :

:-

Gone are the golden days of yore,

When Christmas was a high-day,

Whose sports we now shall see no more,

'Tis turned into Good-Friday.

The abolition of the Christmas festivities is a frequent subject of sarcasm in the songs of the Cavaliers. See, also, Cleveland's Christmas Day.

Th' apostles of this fierce religion,
Like Mahomet's, were ass and widgeon,*
To whom our knight, by fast instinct
Of wit and temper, was so linked,
As if hypocrisy and nonsense

Had got the advowson of his conscience.
Thus was he gifted and accoutered,
We mean on th' inside, not the outward:
That next of all we shall discuss;
Then listen, Sirs, it follows thus:
His tawny beard was th' equal grace
Both of his wisdom and his face;
In cut and die so like a tile,t
A sudden view it would beguile;
The upper part whereof was whey,
The nether orange, mixed with grey.
This hairy meteor did denounce
The fall of sceptres and of crowns; ‡
With grisly type did represent
Declining age of government,

And tell, with hieroglyphic spade,
Its own grave and the state's were made.

The ass is the milk-white beast, called Alborach, upon which Mahomet rode to heaven; and by the widgeon must be understood the pigeon that was trained by Mahomet to pick seeds out of his ear, so that it might be thought to be the messenger of inspired communica、 tions. It seems that the breed of that favoured pigeon was long preserved at Mecca with superstitious care.

In the time of Charles I. the beard was generally worn sharply peaked, and the hair long over the neck. Powder appears to have been sometimes worn. John Owen, Dean of Christchurch and ViceChancellor of Oxford, 1652, is described, in querpo like a young scholar, with powdered hair, snake-bone bandstrings, a lawn band, a large set of ribands pointed at the knees, Spanish leather boots with large lawn tops, and his hat most curiously cocked.' The cultivation of the beard was an object of serious concern. They were so curious in the management of them,' says Dr. Grey, 'that some had pasteboard cases to put over them in the night, lest they should turn upon them, and rumple them in their sleep.'

As a comet is supposed to portend some dire calamities to the state, so this beard, dedicated to the Parliament, menaced the fall of the monarchy.

Like Samson's heart-breakers,* it grew
In time to make a nation rue;
Though it contributed its own fall,
To wait upon the public downfall:
It was canonic,† and did grow
In holy orders by strict vow;‡
Of rule as sullen and severe
As that of rigid Cordeliere:§
'Twas bound to suffer persecution
And martyrdom with resolution;
T' oppose itself against the hate
And vengeance of th' incensed state,
In whose defiance it was worn,
Still ready to be pulled and torn,
With red-hot irons to be tortured,
Reviled, and spit upon, and martyred:
Maugre all which, 'twas to stand fast,
As long as monarchy should last;
But when the state should hap to reel,
'Twas to submit to fatal steel,
And fall, as it was consecrate,
A sacrifice to fall of state,||

* The 'heart-breakers' were loose flying locks worn by ladies over their shoulders.

+ Originally monastic-changed by Butler in the ed. 1674. This vow is chronicled in the burlesque ballad of The Cobbler and Vicar of Bray. Here again the beard is described as a meteor :

This worthy knight was one that swore

He would not cut his beard,

'Till this ungodly nation was

From kings and bishops cleared.

Which holy vow he firmly kept,
And most devoutly wore
A grisly meteor on his face,

'Till they were both no more.

§ A friar of the Franciscan Order, called in England (where they first established themselves in 1224) a Grey Friar. They wore a knotted cord tied round the waist-hence the name of Cordeliere.

This custom of offering up the beard, or the hair of the head, as a sacrifice, may be traced to a remote antiquity, and seems to be a remnant of the Jewish law. For a passage where Arcite makes

Whose thread of life the fatal sisters
Did twist together with its whiskers,
And twine so close, that time should never,
In life or death, their fortunes sever;
But with his rusty sickle mow

Both down together at a blow.
So learned Taliacotius,* from
The brawny part of porter's bum,
Cut supplemental noses, which
Would last as long as parent breech:
But when the date of Nockt was out,
Off dropped the sympathetic snout.

His back, or rather burthen, showed
As if it stooped with its own load:
For as Æneas bore his sire

Upon his shoulders through the fire,
Our knight did bear no less a pack
Of his own buttocks on his back;

a vow to devote his beard to Mars, see Chaucer's Poems, Ann. Ed. i. 167:

And eek to this avow I wol me bynde:

My berd, myn heer that hangeth longe adoun,

That never yit ne fell offensioun

Of rasour ne of schere, I wol thee give,

And be thy trewe servaunt whiles I lyve.

* Gasper Taliacotius, a professor of surgery at Bologna, where he died in 1599, published a treatise on the art of ingrafting noses, ears, lips, &c. The practice is ridiculed in a humorous paper in the Tatler; but there is no doubt that the operation has been frequently performed with success. So lately as 1815 Mr. Carpue published an account of 'two successful operations for restoring a lost nose, from the integuments of the forehead, in cases of two officers of his majesty's army.' Taliacotius was not the originator of the art; it had been practised by Vesalius, the anatomist, and one or two others before his time. The magistrates of Bologna had so high an opinion of his skill, that they erected a statue of him, holding a nose in his hand.

+ Literally a notch, or slit-hence nick, which is a corruption of it; used also to imply something of a different material added to finish off anything. It was likewise applied figuratively to the posteriors; but the more usual term in that sense was nock-andro:

Blest be Dulcinea, whose favour I beseeching,

Rescued poor Andrew, and his nock-andro from breeching.
GAYTON'S Fest. Notes.

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