For he, in all h is am'rous battles,
No 'dvantage finds like goods and chattels,
Drew home his bow, and aiming right,315
Let fly an arrow at the Knight;
The shaft against a rib did glance,
And gall him in the purtenance;[1]
But time had somewhat 'swaged his pain,
After he had found his suit in vain:320
For that proud dame, for whom his soul
Was burnt in 's belly like a coal,
That belly that so oft did ake.
And suffer griping for her sake,
Till purging comfits and ant's eggs[2]325
Had almost brought him off his legs,—
Us'd him so like a base rascallion,
That old Pyg—what d' y' call him—malion,
That cut his mistress out of stone,[3]
Had not so hard a hearted one.330
She had a thousand jadish tricks,
Worse than a mule that flings and kicks;
'Mong which one cross-grain'd freak she had,
As insolent as strange and mad;
She could love none but only such335
As scorn'd and hated her as much.[4]
'Twas a strange riddle of a lady;
Not love, if any lov'd her? hey-day![5]
So cowards never use their might.
But against such as will not fight.340
- ↑ A ludicrous name for the knight's heart: taken from a calf's head and purtenance, as it is vulgarly called, instead of appurtenance (or pluck), which, among other entrails, contains the heart. The word is used in the same sense in the Bible. See Exodus xii. 9.
- ↑ Ants' eggs were formerly supposed, by some, to be antaphrodisiacs, or antidotes to love passions. See Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, b. vi. ch. 7.
- ↑ Pygmalion, as the mythologists say, fell in love with a statue of his own carving; which Venus, to gratify him, turned into a living woman. See Ovid's Metamorphoses, lib. x. l. 247.
- ↑ Such capricious kind of love is described by Horace: Satires, book i. ii. 105.
- ↑ So in the edition of 1678, in others it is ha-day, but either may stand, as they both signify a mark of admiration. See Skinner and Junius.
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