With saucer-eyes, and horns and some

Have heard the devil beat a drum:
But if our eyes are not false glasses,
That give a wrong account of faces;
That beard and I should be acquainted,
Before 't was conjur'd and inchanted;
For though it be disfigur'd somewhat,
As if 't had lately been in combat,
It did belong to a worthy Knight,
Howe'er this goblin is come by 't.

When Hudibras the Lady heard,
Discoursing thus upon his beard,

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And speak with such respect and honor,

Both of the beard, and the beard's owner;

Nor is it worn by fiend or elf,

But its proprietor himself.

O heav'ns! quoth she, can that be true;

I do begin to fear 't is you;

Not by your individual whiskers,
But by your dialect and discourse,
That never spoke to man or beast

In notions vulgarly exprest.

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Have any

title to his own beard,

Tho' yours be sorely lugg'd and torn,

It does your visage more adorn,

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Than if 't were prun'd, and starch'd, and lander'd,

And cut square by the Russian standard.

A torn beard 's like a tatter'd ensign,

That 's bravest which there are most rents in.

That petticoat about your shoulders,

Does not so well become a soldier's ;

And I'm afraid they are worse handled ;
Altho' i' th' rear, your beard the van led:

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And those unseemly bruises make

My heart for company to ake,

To see so worshipful a friend

I' th' pillory set, at the wrong end.

Quoth Hudibras, This thing call'd pain

Is (as the learned Stoics maintain)

Not bad simpliciter, not good;
But merely as 't is understood.
Sense is deceitful, and may feign,
As well in counterfeiting pain

As other gross phenomenas,

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In which it oft mistakes the case.

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But since th' immortal intellect

(That's free from error and defect,
Whose objects still persist the same)
Is free from outward bruise or maim,
Which nought external can expose

To

gross material bangs or blows; It follows, we can ne'er be sure

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Others, tho' wounded sore in reason,

Felt no contusion, nor discretion.

A Saxon duke did grow so fat,

That mice, as histories relate,

Ate grots and labyrinths to dwell in

His postic parts, without his feeling :

Then how is 't possible a kick

Should e'er reach that way to the quick?
Quoth she, I grant it is in vain
For one that 's basted, to feel pain,
Because the pangs his bones endure,
Contribute nothing to the cure:

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Some have been beaten till they know
What wood a cudgel 's of by th' blow:

Some kick'd, until they can feel whether
A shoe be Spanish or neat's leather;

And yet have met, after long running,

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With some whom they have taught that cunning,