who, to purge their states from evil weeds and seditious plants, which, to the great misfortune of good men, do grow there in such abundance, had obtained the miraculous instruments of drum and trumpet, at the sound whereof mallow, henbane, dog-caul, and other pernicious plants of unuseful persons, do of themselves willingly forsake the ground, to make room for lettuce, burnet, sorrel, and other useful herbs of artificers and citizens, and wither of themselves and die, amongst the brakes and brambles, out of the garden (their country), the which they did much prejudice; and that the gardeners would esteem it a great happiness, if they could obtain such an instrument from his Majesty. To this Apollo answered, That if princes could as casily discern seditious men, and such as were unworthy to live in this world's garden, as gardeners might know henbane and nettles from spinach and lettuce, he would have only given them halters and axes for their instruments, which are the true pick-axes by which the seditious herbs (vagabonds which, being but the useless luxuries of human fecundity, deserve not to eat bread) may be rooted up. But since all men were made after the same manner, so as the good could not be known from the bad by the leaves of the face, or stalks of stature, the instruments of drum and trumpet were granted for public peace sake to princes, the sound whereof was cheerfully followed by such plants as took delight in dying, to the end that by the frequent use of gibbets, wholesome herbs should not be extirpated, instead of such as were venomous. The ambassadors would have replied again, but Apollo, with much indignation, bid them hold their peace, and charged them to be gone from Parnassus with all speed; for it was altogether impertinent and ridiculous to compare the purging of the world from seditious spirits with the weeding of noisome herbs out of a garden.”

V. 194. He'll sign it with Cler. Parl. Dom. Com.] The abbreviation of the Clerk of the Lords and Commons in Parliament. The House of Commons, even before the Rump had murdered the king, and expelled the House of Lords, usurped many branches of the royal prerogative, and particularly this for granting licenses for new inventions; which licenses, as well as their orders, were signed by the clerk of the House; having borrowed the me

thod of drums from Boccalini, who makes Apollo send the inventor of this engine to the devil, by whom he supposes the House of Commons to be governed.

V. 212. Who, that their base births might be hid.] Bayle, in his Philosophical and Historical Dictionary, art. Salmacis, argues very curiously the question of the ancient heroes giving themselves out to be the descendants of immortal deities. This opinion probably had its rise in the following circumstances. In the ancient tem

ples the most obscene rites were often perpetrated between the priests and the female votaries of the different deities; and whenever a woman became pregnant, as it would have been a high scandal to have charged any of the priests with the offence, the fault was laid to the deity in whose temple the amour had been carried on. In India, at the present day, there are maintained in the Hindoo temples vast numbers of singing and dancing girls, as well for purposes of public worship, as for the private recreation of the priests, and whenever any of them happen to become pregnant, their offspring are said to be the children of the particular image in whose temple they may happen to be born.

V. 218. Of which old Homer first made lampoons.] Several of the Grecian and Trojan heroes are represented by Homer as vainly boasting of their births, when they should have been in the heat of action; and amongst these Diomedes, in Iliad xiv. 1. 124. "A youth, who from the mighty Tydeus springs, May speak to counsels, and assemble kings. Hear then in me the great Enides' son, Whose honour'd dust (his race of glory run) Lies 'whelm'd in ruins of the Theban wall, Brave in his life, and glorious in his fall.” Thus Idomeneus, Iliad xiii. 564.

"From Jove, enamour'd of a mortal dame,
Great Minos, guardian of his country, came:
Deucalion, blameless prince! was Minos' heir,
His first-born I, the third from Jupiter."

And Æneas does the same when he is going to engage Achilles, who had insulted him. Iliad xx. 245.

To one that fears thee, some unwarlike boy;

Such we disdain: the best may be defy'd
With mean reproaches, and unmanly pride,
Unworthy the high race from which we came,
Proclaim'd so loudly by the voice of fame;
Each from illustrious fathers draws his line,
Each goddess-born, half human half divine.
Thetis' this day, or Venus' offspring dies,

And tears shall trickle from celestial eyes."

V. 219. Arctophylax in northern sphere.] A constellation in the northern hemisphere, near the greater bear, called Bootes.

V. 231. Tho' by Promethean fire made.] Prometheus was the son of Japetus, and brother of Atlas, concerning whom the poets have feigned, that, having first formed men of the earth and water, he stole fire from heaven to put life into them; and that having thereby displeased Jupiter, he commanded Vulcan to tie him to Mount Caucasus with iron chains, and that a vulture should prey upon his liver continually. But the most rational interpretation of the fable is, "That Prometheus was an astrologer, and constant in observing the stars upon that mountain, and that, among other things, he found out the art of making fire, either by means of a flint, or by contracting the sun's beams in a glass." Swift, in his Intelligencer, gives the history of Prometheus in the following words: "There is an old heathen story," says he, "that Prometheus, who was a potter of Greece, took a frolic to turn all the clay in his shop into men and women, separating the fine from the coarse in order to distinguish the sexes. It was pleasant enough to see with what contrivance and order he disposed of his journeymen in their several apartments, and how judiciously he assigned each of them his work, according to his natural talents and capacity, so that every member and part of the human frame was finished with the utmost exactness and beauty. In one chamber you might see a leg-shaper, in another a skull-roller, in a third an arm-stretcher, in a fourth a gut-winder, for each workman was distinguished by a proper term of art, such as a knuckle-turner, tooth-grinder, ribcooper, muscle-maker, tendon-drawer, paunch-blower, veinbrancher, and the like. But Prometheus himself made the eyes, the ears, and the heart, which, because of their nice and intricate structure, were chiefly the business of a master workman. Be

sides this, he completed the whole by fitting and joining the several parts together, according to the best symmetry and proportion. The statues are now upon their legs; life, the chief ingredient, is wanting. Prometheus takes a ferula in his hand, (a reed in the island of Chios, having an old pith), steals up the back stairs to Apollo's lodging, lights it clandestinely at the chariot of the sun; so down he creeps upon his tip-toes to his warehouse, and in a very few minutes, by the application of the flame to the nostrils of his clay images, sets them all a stalking and staring through one another, but entirely insensible of what they were doing: they looked so like the latter end of a lord mayor's feast, he could not bear the sight of them. He then saw it was absolutely necessary to give them passions, or life would be an insipid thing; and so, from the superabundance of them in other animals, he culls out enough for his purpose, which he blended and tempered so well before infusion, that his men and women became the most amiable creatures that thought can conceive."

V. 235. The learned write, a red-hot spit.] Butler here and before sarcastically derides those who were great admirers of the sympathetic powder and weapon-salve, which were in high repute in those days, and much promoted by the celebrated Sir Kenelm Digby, who wrote a treatise professedly on the subject, entitled a Discourse concerning the Cure of Wounds by Sympathy The metallic tractors of the present day operate, where they are successful, upon a somewhat similar principle, and in the same way the old women's charms for the cure of the ague, tooth-ache, &c. V. 245-6. A skilful leech is better far

Than half a hundred men-of-war.] Homer speaking of Machaon, the son of Esculapius, who was one of the physicians to the Grecian army at the siege of Troy, says,

"A wise physician, skill'd our wounds to heal,

Is more than armies to the public weal.”

Spenser, in his Fairy Queen, uses the word leech in the same sense that Butler here does, to imply a physician :

"Her words prevail'd, and then the learned leech
His cunning hand 'gan to his wounds to lay,
And all things else, the which his art did teach;
Which, having seen from thence, arose away

The mother of dread darkness, and let stay

Aveugle's son there in the leech's cure."

Dr. Grey says, persons skilled in the distempers of cows, and other horned cattle, are, in several counties, to this day, called 66 cow-leeches."

V. 257.

gorget.] A neck-piece of plate worn by the

officers of foot soldiers.

V. 259.

and langued.] A term in heraldry, which expresses such animals whose tongue appearing out of the mouth is borne of a different colour from that of the body.

V. 265-6. He was by birth, some authors write,

A Russian, some a Muscovite.] In Butler's time the Russian empire was called indifferently either Russia or Muscovy, and therefore the bear being a native of it, might either have been called a Russian or a Muscovite. At the present day most of the bears exhibited in England are called Russian bears, though the greater part that come into this country are procured from Swedish Finland and the forests of Poland. There are likewise some of these animals brought every year from Hudson's Bay.

V. 267. And 'mong the Cossacks had been bred.] The irregular soldiers of the Russian army, who, in Butler's time, were accounted the most savage and uncivilized barbarians in Europe.

V. 271, Scrimansky was his cousin-german.] Probably a noted bear of those times, to whose name a Polish or Cossack termination of sky was given.

V. 275-6. And tho' his countrymen, the Huns,

Did stew their meat between their bums.] Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Huns as putting slices of raw meat upon the backs of their horses, which served them in the first instance for saddles, and afterwards for food, when the moisture of the flesh was dried up.

V. 292. Yet Talgol, &c.] This personage, Sir Roger L'Estrange informs us, was a butcher in Newgate Market, who obtained a captain's commission in the rebel forces, for his bravery at the battle of Naseby. His proper name was Jackson.

V. 302. And, like a champion, shone with oil.] That is, Dr. Grey observes, he was a greasy butcher. But the humour of the passage is heightened when we consider, that the wrestlers, in the