(The work of Thychius, who in Nylé dwell'd,

And in all arts of armoury excell'd.)

This Ajax bore before his manly breast,

And, threat'ning, thus his adverse chief address'd."

It was a much easier matter to cut half a dozen score of bullhides as a cobler, than to pierce the shield of such a warrior as Ajax.

V. 421-2. With whom his black-thumb'd ancestor

Was comrade in the ten years' war.] Warburton says, the thumb of a cobler being black is a sign of his being diligent in his business, and that he gets money, according to the old rhyme:

“The higher the plumb-tree, the riper the plumb;

The richer the cobler, the blacker his thumb."

V. 425-6. And were renown'd, as Homer writes,

For well soal'd boots, no less than fights.] Dr. Grey, in his edition of Hudibras, has the following note upon this passage, which, as it is sufficiently ample, is probably all that can be said upon the subject. "In a curious Dissertation upon Boots, written in express ridicule of Colonel Hewson (probably shadowed in the character of Cerdon) is a humorous passage, which seems to explain the lines under consideration. The second use is a use of reproof, to reprove all those that are self-willed, and cannot be persuaded to buy them waxed boots; but to such as these, examples move more than precepts, wherefore I'll give one or two. I read of Alexander the Great, that, passing over a river in Alexandria, without his winter boots, he took such extreme cold in his feet, that he suddenly fell sick of a violent fever, and four days after died at Babylon. The like I find in Plutarch, of that noble Roman, Sertorius; and also in Homer of Achilles, that leaving his boots behind him, and coming barefoot into the Temple of Pallas, while he was worshipping on his knees at her altar, he was pierced in the heel by a venomed dart by Paris, the only part of him that was vulnerable, of which he suddenly died; which accident had never happened to him, as Alexander Ross, that little Scotch mythologist, observes, had he not two days before pawned his boots to Ulysses, and so was forced to come without them to the Trojan sacrifice. He also further observes, that

this Achilles, of whom Homer has writ such wonders, was but a shoemaker's boy of Greece, and that when Ulysses sought him out, he at last found him at the distaff spinning of shoemakers' thread. Now this boy was so beloved, that, as soon as it was reported abroad that the oracle had chosen him to rule the Grecians and conquer Troy, all the journeymen in the country listed themselves under him, and these were the myrmidons wherewith he got all his honor, and overcame the Trojans."-Phoenix Britannicus, p. 268.

V. 435. But preaching was his chiefest talent.] In the time of the great rebellion mechanics of all sorts were preachers, and some of them much followed and admired by the mob. "I am

to tell thee, Christian reader," says Dr. Featley, preface to his Dipper Dipped," wrote 1645, and published 1647, p. 1. "this new year of new changes, never heard of in former ages, namely, of stables turned into temples (and I will beg leave to add, temples turned into stables, as was that of St. Paul's and many more), stalls into quires, shop-boards into communion-tables, tubs into pulpits, aprons into linen ephods, and mechanics of the lowest rank into priests of the high places. I wonder that our door-posts and walls sweat not upon which such notes as these have lately been affixed: on such a day, such a brewer's clerk exerciseth, such a tailor expoundeth, such a waterman teacheth. If cooks, instead of mincing their meat, fall upon dividing of the word; if tailors leap up from the shop-board into the pulpit, and patch up sermons out of stolen shreds; if not only of the lowest of the people, as in Jeroboam's time, priests are consecrated to the most high God:or do we marvel to see such confusion in the church as there is?" In another tract, entitled, "The Reformado precisely characterised, by a modern Churchwarden,"-" Here,” says he, are felt-makers who can roundly deal with the blockheads and neutral demicasters of the world; coblers who can give good rules for upright walking, and handle Scripture to a bristle; coachmen, who know how to lash the beastly enormities and curb the headstrong insolences of this brutish age, stoutly exhorting us to stand up for the truth, lest the wheel of destruction roundly overrun us. We have weavers that can sweetly inform us of the shuttle-swiftness of the times, and practically tread out the vicissitude of all sublunary

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things, till the web of our life be cut off; and here are mechanios of my profession, who can separate the pieces of salvation from those of damnation, measure out every man's portion, and cut it out by a thread, substantially pressing the points till they have fashionably filled up their work with a well-bottomed conclusion." Mr. Thomas Hall, in proof of this scandalous practice, published a tract, called "The Pulpit guarded by Seventeen Arguments," 1651, occasioned by a dispute at Henley, in Warwickshire, August 20, 1650, against Laurence Williams, a nailer, public preacher; Thomas Palmer, baker, public preacher; Thomas Hind, a ploughwright, public preacher; Henry Oakes, a weaver, preacher; Hum. Rogers, late a baker's boy, public preacher.

"God keep the land from such translators,

From preaching coblers, pulpit praters,

Of order and allegiance haters.”

V. 441.

Colon, &c.] By the character of Colon was

designed one Perry, an hostler.

V. 445-6. That which of Centaur long ago

Was said, and has been wrested to.] Warburton supposes this passage was intended to ridicule the false eloquence of romance writers and bad historians, who, to set out the unwearied diligence of their hero, often expressed themselves in this manner: "he was so much on horseback, that he was of a piece with his horse, like a Centaur.

V. 453-4. Although his horse had been of those

That fed on man's flesh, as fame goes.] According to the ancient poets, Diomedes, King of Thrace, fed his horses upon human flesh. He was slain by Hercules, and his body thrown to be devoured by those horses to which the tyrant had exposed others.

V. 456. - for flesh is grass.] A ridicule on the Presbyterians, who constantly interlarded their common conversation with Scripture phrases, and made as free with the Bible as modern wits do with play books.

V. 458. Than Hercules to clean a stable.] Hercules in one day cleansed the stable of Augeas, King of Elis, by turning the course of the river Alpheus through it. This stable had never been cleansed, although three thousand oxen stabled in it thirty years;

whence, when we would express a work of immense toil and labour `in proverbial speech, we call it cleansing the stables of Augeas. V. 461-2. He ripp'd the womb up of his mother,

Dame Tellus, 'cause she wanted fodder.] Poetry delights in making the meanest things look sublime and mysterious; that agreeable way of expressing the wit and humour our poet was master of, is partly manifested in this verse: a poetaster would have been contented with giving this thought in Butler, the appellation of ploughing, which is all that it signifies.

V. 473-4. For beasts, when man was but a piece

Of earth himself, did th' earth possess.] Man being the last created; cows, pigs, and other animals were undoubtedly of the elder house. The translator of Dubartus's Divine Weeks thus

expresses the same thought:

"Now of all creatures which His word did make,
Man was the last that living breath did take;
Not that he was the least, or that God durst
Not undertake so noble a work at first;
Rather, because he should have made in vain

So great a prince, without on whom to reign."

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The pious Dubartus seems to have had a much higher opinion of the dignity of man's nature than the Hindoo philosopher and legislator Menu, who thus forcibly but singularly describes the body of this great prince: “A mansion with bones for its rafters and beams; with nerves and tendons for cords; with muscles and blood for mortar; with skin for its outward covering; filled with no sweet perfume, but loaded with feces and urine. A mansion infested by age and by sorrow, the seat of malady, harassed with pains, haunted with the quality of darkness, and incapable of standing long; such a mansion of the vital soul let its occupier always cheerfully quit."- Institutes of Menu.-Works of Sir W. Jones. V. 475-6. These worthies were the chief that led

The combatants, &c.] The characters of the leaders of the bear-baiting being now given, a question may arise, why the Knight opposes persons of his own stamp, and of his own way of thinking in that recreation? It is plain that he took them to be so, by his manner of addressing them in the famous harangue that follows. An answer may be given several ways: he thought

himself bound, in commission and conscience, to suppress a game which he and his Squire had so learnedly judged to be unlawful, and therefore he could not dispense with it even in his brethren; he insinuates, that they were ready to engage in the same pious designs with himself, and the liberty they took was by no means suitable to the character of reformers. In short, he uses all his rhetoric to cajole, and threats to terrify, them to desist from their

darling sports, for the plausible saving their cause's reputation. V. 484. Of diff'rent manners, speech, religion.] Never were there so many different sects and religions in any nation as were then in England. Mr. Case, in a thanksgiving sermon, preached before the Parliament, on occasion of the taking of Chester, told them, "That there was such a numerous increase of errors and heresies, that he blushed to repeat what some had affirmed, namely, that there were no less than one hundred and fourscore several heresies propagated and spread in the neighbouring city (London), and many of them of such a nature (says he) as I may truly say, in Calvin's language, the errors and innovations under which they groaned of late years were but tolerable trifles, children's play, compared with these damnable doctrines of devils." And Mr. Ford, a celebrated divine of those times, observed in an assize sermon preached at Reading, "That, in the little town of Reading, he was verily persuaded, if Augustines's and Epiphanius's catalogues of heresies were lost, and all other modern and ancient records of that kind, yet it would be no hard matter to restore them, with considerable enlargements, from that place; that they have Anabaptism, Familianism, Socinianism, Pelagianism, ranting, and what not: and that the devil was served in heterodox assemblies as frequently as God in theirs, and that one of the most eminent church livings in that county was possessed by a blasphemer, one in whose house he believed some there could testify that the devil was as visibly familiar as any one of the family." V. 493-4. What rage, O citizens! what fury

Doth you to these dire actions hurry.] A paraphrase of those lines of Lucan, beginning Quis furo, O cives, &c. and thus translated by Sir Arthur Gorges:

"Dear citizens, what brain-sick charms,

What outrage of disorder'd arms,