In northern climé a valrous knight i molt int Did whilom kill his bear in fight,

And wound a fiddler: we have both

Of these the objects of our worth,

And equal fame and glory from

900

Th' attempt of victory to come.

'Tis sung, there is a valiant Mamaluke In foreign land, yclep'd--

To whom we have been oft compar'd

905

For person, parts, address, and beard;

Both equally reputed stout,

And in the same cause both have fought;

He oft in such attempts as these

Came off with glory and success;

Nor will we fail in th' execution,
For want of equal resolution.

910

Honour is like a widow, won

With brisk attempt and putting on,

With ent❜ring manfully, and urging,

915

Not slow approaches, like a virgin.

This said, as yerst the Phrygian knight,

So ours, with rusty steel did smite

His Trojan horse, and just as much,

He mended pace upon the touch;

920

But from his empty stomach groan'd, den ul

Just as that hollow beast did sound,

And angry answer'd from behind,

With brandish'd tail and blast of wind.

So have I seen, with armed heel,

A wight bestride a commonweal;

While still the more he kick'd and spurr'd,
The less the sullen jade has stirr❜d.

(

925

V. 1. When civil dudgeon, &c.] To take in dudgeon is inwardly to resent some injury or affront, and what is previous to actual fury. Butler here alludes to the temper of the nation previous to the actual breaking out of the great rebellion.

V. 2. And men fell out they knew not why.] It may justly be said they knew not why, since, as Lord Clarendon observes in his History of the Rebellion, "the like peace and plenty, and universal tranquillity, was never enjoyed by any nation for ten years together, before those unhappy troubles began.”

i V. 3. When hard words, &c.] By hard words Butler probably means the cant phrases used by the Presbyterians and sectaries of those times; such as gospel walking, gospel preaching, soul saving, elect, saints, the godly, the predestinate, and the like, which they applied to their own preachers and themselves; and such words, as papists, prelatists, malignants; reprobates, wicked, ungodly, and carnal minded, which they applied to all loyal persons, who were desirous of maintaining the established constitution in church and state, by which they infused strange fears and jealousies into the heads of the people, and made them believe there was a formal design' in the king and his ministers to deprive them of their religion and liberty. The licentiousness of the demagogues in parliament soon produced a corresponding sentiment among the people out of doors. They first raised mobs to drive the king out of his palace, and then raised regular forces to fight, as they falsely and wickedly pretended, for their religion. Among other expedients they used

to inflame the minds of the people, they set them against the Common Prayer, which they made them believe was the mass book in English, and nick-named it Porridge. They enraged them likewise against the surplice, calling it a rag of popedom, the whore of Babylon's smock, and the smock of the whore of Rome.

V. 6. As for a punk.] Sir John Suckling has expressed this thought a little more decently in the tragedy of Brennoralt:

Religion now is a young mistress here,

For which each man will fight and die at least;

Let it alone awhile, and 'twill become

A kind of married wife, people will be

Content to live with it in quietness."

V. 8. Tho' not a man of them knew wherefore.] The greatest bigots are usually persons of the shallowest judgment, as was the case in those seditious and fanatical times, when women and the meanest mechanics became zealous sticklers for controversies which none of them could be supposed to understand. An ingenious Italian, in Queen Elizabeth's days, gave this character of the Disciplinarians, who were the Puritans' predecessors, that the common people were wiser than the wisest of his nation; for here the very women and shopkeepers were better able to judge of predestination, and what laws were fit to be made concerning church government, than what were fit to be obeyed or demolished, that they were more able (or at least thought theniselves so) to raise and determine perplexed cases of conscience, than the most learned colleges in Italy; that men of slightest learning, or at least the most ignorant of the common people, were mad for a new, or a super or re-formation of religion. And in this they appeared like that man who would never leave to whet and whet his knife till there was no steel left to make it useful."

V.9. When gospel trumpeter, surrounded.] Many of the Puritan soldiers were preachers, as well as military men; and in their discourses used to incite the people to rebellion, to fight, as they called it, the lord's battles, and to destroy the Amalekites root and branch, hip and thigh. By the Amalekites must be understood all that loved the king, the bishops, and the common prayer. After the civil war actually broke out, some of their preachers told them, that they should bind their kings in chains, and their nobles

in links of iron, both of which almost literally happened. It has been fully proved, that many of the regicides were drawn into the grand rebellion by the direful imprecations of seditious preachers from the pulpit. This some of them owned, and, in particular, Dr. South tells us, "That he had it from the mouth of Axtell, the regicide, that he, with many more, went into that execrable war with such a controlling horror upon their spirits, from those public sermons, especially of Brooks and Calamy, that they verily believed they should have been accursed by God for ever, if they had not acted their part in that dismal tragedy, and heartily done the devil's work. And it was in this sense that the doctor said, "that it was the pulpit that supplied the field with swordsmen and the parliament-house with incendiaries." Sir Roger L'Estrange, treating on the same point, says, " A trumpeter in the pul pit is the very emblem of a trumpeter in the field, and the same charge holds good against both; only the spiritual trumpeter is the most pernicious instrument of the two: for the latter serves only to rouse the courage of the soldiers, without any doctrine or application upon the text; whereas the other infuses malice over and above, and preaches death and damnation both in one, and gives the very chapter and verse for it."

V. 10. With long-ear'd rout, to battle sounded.] Ass-cared. The ears of the Puritans were rendered more conspicuous by the shortness of their hair, which was cut close round about their heads. When some of the leading men of the party first went to court, after they had adapted this fashion, the queen, Henrietta Maria, inquired who those round-headed men were? Hence came the lappellation of ROUND-HEADS, by which the Parliamentarians came to be distinguished in opposition to the CAVALIERS, who followed the fortunes of the king, and retained the old fashion of wearing their hair.

V. 11. 12. And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,

Was beat with fist instead of a stick.] Butler here alludes to the vehement action which the Presbyterian preachers used in the pulpit, and their beating the cushion before them with their fists, as if they were beating a drum. It was said of them, "that they had the action of a thresher rather than of a divine;" and Dr. Echard, speaking of one of these threshing