And from celestial origine,
Derived himself in a right line;
Not as the ancient heroes did,
Who, that their base-births might be hid,
Knowing they were of doubtful gender,
And that they came in at a windore,*
Made Jupiter himself, and others
O' th' gods, gallants to their own mothers,
To get on them a race of champions,
Of which old Homer first made lampoons;
Arctophylax,† in northern sphere,
Was his undoubted ancestor;
From him his great forefathers came,
And in all ages bore his name:
Learned he was in med'cinal lore,
For by his side a pouch he wore,
Replete with strange hermetic powder,
That wounds nine miles point-blank would solder;
By skilful chemist, with great cost,
Extracted from a rotten post; §
But of a heavenlier influence
Than that which mountebanks dispense;
Though by Promethean fire made,
As they do quack that drive that trade.
For as, when slovens do amiss
At others' doors, by stool or piss,
The learned|| write, a red-hot spit
B'ing prudently applied to it,
Will convey mischief from the dung
Unto the part that did the wrong;
An old form of window, in common use amongst the earlier writers.
The star Bootes, near Ursa Major.
The sympathetic powder was supposed to possess a healing influence from a distance.-See SIR KENELM DIGBY's Discourse concerning the cure of wounds by sympathy.
§ Useless powders in medicine are called powders of post.-N. || Sir Kenelm Digby, who relates the story of the spit.
So this did healing, and as sure
As that did mischief, this would cure.
Thus virtuous Orsin was endued
With learning, conduct, fortitude
Incomparable; and as the prince
Of poets, Homer, sung long since,
A skilful leech is better far,
Than half a hundred men of war;
So he appeared, and by his skill,
No less than dint of sword, could kill.
The gallant Bruin marched next him,
With visage formidably grim,
And rugged as a Saracen,
Or Turk of Mahomet's own kin,
Clad in a mantle de la 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 victual with.
He was by birth, some authors write,
A Russian, some a Muscovite,
And 'mong the Cossacks had been bred,
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 served, and fed on vermin;
Armed, in heraldry, means when the beak, talons, horns or teeth, of birds or beasts of prey are of a different colour from the rest of the body-langued, when the tongue is of a different colour.
† Probably the name of some well-known bear.
And when these failed, he'd suck his claws,
And quarter himself upon his paws:
And though his countrymen, the Huns,
Did stew their meat between their bums
And th' horses' backs o'er which they straddle,
And ev'ry man ate up his saddle;
He was not half so nice as they,
But ate it raw when 't came in's way.
He had traced countries far and near,
More than Le Blanc the traveller;
Who writes, he spoused in India,
Of noble house, a lady gay,
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 saved citizen; the one
To guard his bear, the other fought
To aid his dog; both made more stout
By several 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 vanquished oftener than he fought:
Inured 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;
A butcher in Newgate-market, who obtained a captain's commission for his valour at Naseby.
He was a greasy butcher, and is compared to the wrestlers who, in the Greek games, rubbed themselves with oil to make their joints supple.
But Guy, with him in fight compared,
Had like the boar or dun-cow fared:
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,
Subdued; as poets say, long agone,
Bold Sir George Saint George did the dragon. §
Nor engine, nor device polemic,
Disease, nor doctor epidemic,||
Though stored with deletery medicines,
Which whosoever took is dead since,
E'er sent so vast a colony
To both the under worlds 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-wheeled chariot, ¶
For daring to profane a thing
So sacred, with so vile bungling.
* Guy, Earl of Warwick, one of whose exploits was a victory over a dun-cow.
† Ajax, in a fit of madness, fell upon a flock of sheep, mistaking them for the Grecian princes who had decided against him in the contention for the armour of Ulysses; and Don Quixote, in like manner, attacked a flock of sheep which he supposed to be the army of the giant Alipharnon.
The wasps and flies which infest butchers' shops, myriads of which the heroic Talgol is supposed to have slaughtered in his time.
§ Dr. Nash observes that there was a real Sir George St. George, who, with Sir Robert Newcomen and Major Ormsby, in February, 1643, was made commissioner for the government of Connaught. It is not improbable, he adds, that this coincidence of names might have forcibly struck the imagination of Butler.
There is humour in joining the epithet epidemic to the doctor, as well as to the disease.-N.
Ille crucem pretium sceleris tulit; hic diadema.
Next these the brave Magnano* came,
Magnano, great in martial fame;
Yet, when with Orsin he waged 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 armèd fist;
Nor could the hardest iron hold out
Against his blows, but they would through 't.
In magic he was deeply read,
As he that made the brazen head; +
Profoundly skilled in the black art,
As English Merlin, for his heart; §
But far more skilful in the spheres,
Than he was at the sieve and shears.
He could transform himself to 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,
Devised 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,
Simeon Wait, a tinker, as famous an Independent preacher as Burroughs, who with equal blasphemy would style Cromwell the archangel giving battle to the devil.-L'ESTRANGE.
+ Alluding to his budget, made of hog-skin.
Some authorities ascribe the brazen head to Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln; others to Albertus Magnus; others to Roger Bacon, a learned friar of the thirteenth century.
§ Lilly, the astrologer, seems to be alluded to. He published two tracts in which he assumed the title given to him here-Merlinus Anglicus.
The old saying-As the devil said to the collier-probably suggested the comparison. A piece of artillery.
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