PART I. CANTO II.

THE ARGUMENT.

The catalogue and character

Of th' enemies' best men of war,'
Whom, in a bold harangue, the Knight
Defies, and challenges to fight:

H' encounters Talgol, routs the Bear,
And takes the Fiddler prisoner,

Conveys him to enchanted castle,

There shuts him fast in wooden Bastile.

The catalogue and character:

Of th' enemies' best men of war.] Butler's description of the combatants resembles the list of warriors in the Iliad and Æneid, and especially the laboured characters in the Theban war, both in Eschylus and Euripides. Septem ad Thebas, v. 383. Icetid. v. 362.

Phoenis. v. 1139.

HUDIBRAS.

CANTO II.

THERE was an ancient sage philosopher
That had read Alexander Ross over,'
And swore the world, as he could prove,
Was made of fighting, and of love.

There was an ancient sage philosopher

That had read Alexander Ross over,] Empedocles, a Pythagorean philosopher and poet, held, that friendship and discord were principles which regulated the four elements that compose the universe. The first occasioned their coalition, the second their separation, or, in the poet's own words, preserved in Diogen. Laert. edit. Meibom. vol. i. p. 538.

*Αλλοτε μὲν φιλότητι συνερχόμεν' εἰς ἓν ἅπαντα,

*Αλλοτε δ ̓ αὖ δίχ ̓ ἕκαστα φορεύμενα νείκεος ἔχθει.

See more in Mer. Casaubon's note on the passage.

The great anachronism increases the humour. Empedocles, the philosopher here alluded to, lived about 2100 years before Alexander Ross.

"Agrigentinum quidem, doctum quendam virum, carminibus "græcis vaticinatum ferunt: quæ in rerum natura, totoque mundo constarent, quæque moverentur, ea contrahere amicitiam, dissipare "discordiam." Cicero de Amicitiâ.

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The Spectator, No. 60, says, he has heard these lines of Hudibras more frequently quoted than the finest pieces of wit in the whole poem:-the jingle of the double rhime has something in it that tickles the ear-Alexander Ross was a very voluminous writer, and chaplain to Charles the first; but most of his books were written in the reign of James the first. He answered Sir Thomas Brown's Pseudoxia and Religio Medici, under the title of Medicus Medicatus.