From whence he vaulted into th' seat, With so much vigour, strength, and heat, It doth behove us to say something As if he grieved to touch the ground; § * The whole of this ludicrous description is singularly happy; the fat, unwieldy knight, encumbered by a load of meat and puddings, and an exceedingly inconvenient costume; with only one stirrup tied up to the saddle very short on the off-side; making a desperate spring to mount, nearly tumbling over by the force of his own weight, and sprawling along the back of the great horse, which he seizes by mane and tail to preserve his equilibrium. + In all the editions bumkin, traced by Dr. Nash to boom, and ken or kin a diminutive. But this is not properly the term used by Butler. Bumkin is a short boom projecting from each bow of a ship. The word in the text should be bumpkin-from bump, large or swelling, and kin, kind or genus; and, applied to a man, means a heavy, awkward, clownish fellow. The allusion is to Sir Roger L'Estrange's fable of the Spaniard under the lash. Being condemned to run the gauntlet, the Spaniard preserved a slow and dignified step, scorning to abbreviate his pain by quickening his pace. § See the description of Don Quixote's Rosinante. Julius Cæsar's horse was said to have had feet like those of a man. And as that beast would kneel and stoop, A Squire he had, whose name was Ralph,t * Butler may, probably, have taken the hint of these lines from the following passage quoted by a correspondent of Notes and Queries:— 'A scholar being jeered on the way for wearing but one spur, said, that if one side of his horse went on, it was not likely that the other would stay behind.'-Gratia Ludentes: Jests from the Universitie. 1638. + Sir Roger L'Estrange says that the original of Ralph was one Isaac Robinson, a zealous butcher in Moorfields; another authority transfers the portrait to a tailor of the name of Pemble, one of the Committee of Sequestrators. Dr. Grey thinks it probable that the name was suggested by that of the grocer's apprentice in Beaumont and Fletcher's play of The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Ralph is the representative of the Independents, as Hudibras is of the Presbyterians. By this contrivance the union (and, also, the rivalry) of the sectaries in a common cause is exhibited throughout the poem. For rhyme the rudder is of verses, To his great ancestor, her heir; From him descended cross-legged knights,+ Whom they destroyed both great and small. * Queen Dido, who having obtained as much land as could be marked round by the hide of an ox, ingeniously cut the hide into strips so narrow as to enable her to enclose a much larger space than had been anticipated. + The knights were represented in their effigies on their tombs with their legs crossed, somewhat in the manner of tailors. In carrying out the double figure of the Templars and the tailors, the bloody cannibal must be understood to represent the Saracens on the one side, and certain small creatures with which tailors are much troubled on the other. § Until the year 1696, when all money not milled was called in, a ninepenny-piece of silver was as common as sixpences or shillings.-G. Bending a coin, and preserving it as a love-token, was an old custom, and still prevails in many parts of the country. The usual form on the occasion of presenting one of these gifts was To my love, from my love. He ne'er considered it, as loth He spent it frank and freely too: That they are ne'er beside their way: Which none can see but those that bear it; For spiritual trades to cozen by;* An ignis fatuus, that bewitches, And leads men into pools and ditches, To make them dip themselves,† and sound To dive, like wild-fowl, for salvation, Traders in spiritual gifts are here compared to traders who have light let down upon their goods through a glass window in the roof. Ralph was probably an Anabaptist or Dipper. Alluding to the prevailing mode of speaking through the nose. Which they at second-hand rehearse, As three or four-legged oracle,* Ideas, atoms, influences; And much of Terra Incognita, And solid lying much renowned:§ The three-legged oracle refers to the Tripos, upon which the priestess sat at Delphos, when she delivered her oracles. A fourlegged oracle probably means, as Dr. Nash suggests, divination by quadruped. + Probably intended to burlesque the Geneva translation of the Bible, published with notes, 1599, which, in the third of Genesis, says of Adam and Eve, they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves breeches.-G. The same expression is repeated elsewhere by Butler, in another form:-' he derives the pedigree of magic from Adam's first green breeches; because fig-leaves being the first clothes that mankind wore, were only used for covering, and therefore are the most ancient monuments of concealed mysteries.'-Character of an hermetic Philosopher. The whole of this passage is in ridicule of the metaphysical and scientific affectations of the day. By th' intelligible world' is meant that remarkably unintelligible world which some philosophers regard as the refugium of ideas, and which to all the rest of the world has no more existence than the elixir vitæ. § Cornelius Agrippa, born in Cologne in 1486, was secretary to the Emperor Maximilian, Doctor of Divinity, physician to the Duchess of Anjou, and historiographer to Charles V. The particular allusion in the text is to a book of magic he published when he was very young, containing the most wonderful collection of falsehoods and impositions that were ever put together on the subject. Agrippa, in the latter part of his life, renounced all these follies, and in making a I. BUTLER. 5 |