To cure the wound the vermin made.] A scorpion bruised in sweet oil, is said by some writers to be a cure for the bite of that reptile, but this opinion did not seem to rest on any more plausible foundation than Sir Kenelm Digby's Theory of the Cure of Wounds by Sympathy, which Butler ridicules in the succeeding lines.

V. 1045-6. And setting all the land on fire,

To burn t'a scantling, and no higher.] Those who have stirred up civil convulsions in a state, and live to see the miseries and mischiefs produced by them, usually alleged in their excuse, that at their setting out they had no design of going further than to the correction of a few grievances; that their intentions were innocent and laudable; but that in the end, having embarked in the business of resistance, it was impossible for them to retrace their steps, and they could not do otherwise than join in the excesses of the times. This was doubtless the case with many of the leaders of the great rebellion; they took up arms with an honest zeal to protect their country against the encroachments of arbitrary power, and afterwards they abetted the violent proceedings against the King and his party, because the dilemma into which they had brought themselves admitted of no other alternative, than either that the King should suffer, or that the whole republican party should be crushed.

V. 1056. And sprinkled in at second-hand.] An allusion to their manner of baptising or admitting members into their churches, in opposition to the practice of the Anabaptists. Dr. Plot, in his History of Oxfordshire, says, "That at Watlington, in that county, there was a sect called Anointers, from their anointing people before they admitted them into their communion."

V. 1065-6. For he had drawn your ears before,

And nick'd them on the self-same score.] An allusion to the case of Mr. Pryn, who had his ears twice cropped for his seditious writings.

V. 1074. From hanging up like alligators.] In former times alligators, and other monsters of that kind, were frequently hung up in the shops of druggists and apothecaries. In the fourth plate

of Hogarth's Marriage-a-la-Mode, an alligator is represented hanging from the cieling of the quack's shop.

V. 1093. Corrupted the Old Testament.] This was done by a fanatical printer, in the seventh commandment, who printed it, "Thou shalt commit adultery," and was fined for it in the Starchamber, or high-commission court. ́

V. 1101-2. As Mahomet, your chief, began

To mix them in the Alcoran.]

Mahomet," says Dr. Grey, was so ignorant, that he could neither write nor read. In drawing up the Koran, he associated to himself a learned Jew, called Aballah Ebn Salem; but the greatest assistance he received was by a Nestorian monk, called by the western historians Sergius, and by the eastern Bahira, an apostate, who had been expelled his monastery for his disorderly life. Such were the architects whom Mahomet employed for the erecting the new system which he projected. The Jew furnished him with various histories from the Old Testament, blended with the chimeras and dreams of the Talmud, out of which Mahomet, in order to heighten the marvellous, picked out some fabulous circumstances of his own inventing, which are still to be seen in the Koran. The Nestorian monk at the same time brought him acquainted with the New Testament, and the discipline of the church. All this he changed and corrupted with fables, which he borrowed from the psuedo gospels and apochryphal books. The Cavaliers were extremely fond of comparing the Presbyterian government to Mahometanism, of which the following lines may serve as a sample :~

"Come, Mahomet, thy turn is next,

New gospel's out of date;
The Alcoran may prove good text

In our new Turkish state:
Thou dost unto thy priests allow
The sin of full four wives,

Ours scarce will be content with now
Five livings, and nine lives.
Thy saints and ours are all alike,
Their virtues flow from vice:

No bliss they do believe, and seek
But an earthly paradise.

A heaven on earth they hope to gain,

But we do know full well,

Could they their glorious end attain,

This kingdom must be hell."

V. 1112. — or Lunsford.] Lunsford was a Cavalier officer, much detested by the republicans, who accused him of having perpetrated the most atrocious barbarities. But it was one of the artifices of the malcontents in the civil war to raise false alarms, and to fill the people full of frightful apprehensions. "In particular," says Dr. Grey," they raised a terrible outcry of the imaginary danger they conceived from the Lord Digby and Colonel Lunsford." Lilburn glories upon his trial for being an incendiary on such occasions, and mentions the tumult he raised against the innocent colonel as a meritorious action. "I was once arraigned," says he, "before the House of Peers, for sticking close to the liberties and privileges of this nation, and those that stood for them, being one of those two or three men that first drew their swords in Westminster Hall against Colonel Lunsford, and some scores of his associates. At that time it was supposed they intended to cut the throats of the chiefest men then sitting in the House of Peers." To render Lunsford still more odious, they reported of him that he was of so brutal an appetite, that he would eat children, which abominable insinuation is deservedly ridiculed in the following lines:

"From Fielding and from Vavasour,

Both ill-affected men;

From Lunsford eke deliver us,

That eateth up children."

And Cleveland banters them upon the same head :—

“The post that came from Banbury

Riding in a blue rochet,

He swore he saw, when Lunsford fell,

A child's arm in his pocket."

And, to make him still more detestable, they made horrid pictures

of him, as we learn from the following lines of Cleveland:

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66

They fear the giblets of his train, they fear

Even his dog, that four-legg'd Cavalier;

He that devours the scraps which Lunsford makes,

Whose picture feeds upon a child in steaks."

Dr. Echard gives a very contrary account of him, and says that he was a person of extraordinary sobriety, industry, and courage, and that he was killed at the taking of Bristol by the King, in 1643.

transform'd to Meroz.] An allusion to Judges,

V. 1120. v. 28. "Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord; curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty." This was a text frequently in the mouth of the fanatical preachers of those times, and which they were wont to sound often in the ears of the people, to make them imagine they should fall under a grievous curse, if they, as many at least as were fit to make soldiers, did not list into the Parliament army, to fight, what these hypocritical rebels called, the Lord's battles against the mighty, by which they meant the King and his partisans. In a tract entitled a Century of eminent Presbyterian Preachers, the following lines occur on the same subject:

"Then curse ye Meroz, in each pulpit did thunder,

To perplex the poor people and keep them in wonder, Till the reins of goverment were quite broke asunder.” The Scots, in their Declaration concerning their Expedition into England, say, "The Lord save us from the curse of Meroz, who came not to help the Lord against the mighty."-" How careful they and their English brethren were to keep all others from that curse,” says Dr. Grey, "appears from the declaration of both kingdoms, 1643."- We give,' say they, 'public warning to such persons to rest no longer upon their neutrality, but to take the covenant, and join with all their power; otherwise we do declare them to be public enemies to their religion and country, and that they are to be censured and punished as professed adversaries and malignants.'

V. 1127-8. And settle on a new freehold

As Marclay-hill had done of old.] Camden, in his Britannia, says, "That near the conflux of the Lug and Wye (Herefordshire) eastward, a hill which they call Marclay-hill, did, in the year 1575, as it were, rouse itself out of sleep, and for three

days together shoving its prodigious body forward, with a horrible roaring noise, and overturning every thing out of its way, raised itself, to the great astonishment of the beholders, to a higher place, by that kind of earthquake, I suppose, which naturalists call brasmatia."

V. 1135-6. Until the cause became a Damon,

And Pythias the Wicked Mammon.] Damon and Pythias were followers of the philosopher Pythagoras. When Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, had condemned one of them to die, he begged a few days to set his house in order, and the other willingly offered himself, in the meanwhile, to stay as a pledge, and to die instead of his friend, if he returned not at the time appointed. But he came according to appointment to suffer death himself, and thereby release his friend, who had engaged for his return. When the tyrant saw this faithfulness of their friendship, he pardoned him that was condemned to die, and desired that he might be admitted as a third person in their friendship.

V. 1162. Nor snuffled treason, &c.] An allusion to the nasal pronunciation of the seditious preachers of those times. In ano ther poem by our author, entitled a Geneva Ballad, he thus speaks of them:

"To draw in proselytes, like bees,

With pleasing twang, he tones his prose,
He gives his handkerchief a squeeze,

And draws John Calvin through his nose."

And in his poem entitled Oliver's Court; "If he be one of the eating tribe,

Both a Pharisec and Scribe,

And hath learn'd th' sniv'ling tone

Of a flux'd devotion,

Cursing, from his swearing tub,
The Cavaliers to Beelzebub;

Let him repair," &c.

V. 1185. Brave undertakers to restore,

That could not keep yourselves in power.] When the King was restored, the Presbyterians wanted to take upon themselves the merit of that transaction, and till the army was disbanded, the King thought it convenient in some measure to cajole