To get on them a race of champions,
Of which old Homer first made lampoons.
Arctophylax, in northern sphere,[1]
Was his undoubted ancestor; 220
From whom his great forefathers came,
And in all ages bore his name:
Learned he was in med'c'nal lore,
For by his side a pouch he wore,
Replete with strange hermetic powder,[2] 225
That wounds nine miles point-blank would solder;[3]
By skilful chymist, with great cost,
Extracted from a rotten post;[4]
But of a heav'nlier influence
Than that which mountebanks dispense; 230
Tho' by Promethean fire made,[5]
As they do quack that drive that trade.
For as when slovens do amiss
At others' doors, by stool or piss,
The learned write, a red-hot spit 235
Being prudently applied to it,
Will convey mischief from the dung[6]
Unto the breech[7] that did the wrong;
So this did healing, and as sure
As that did mischief, this would cure. 240
Thus virtuous Orsin was endued
With learning, conduct, fortitude
Incomparable; and as the prince
Of poets, Homer, sung long since,
- ↑ Butler makes the constellation Bootes—which lies in the rear of Ursa Major—the mythological ancestor of the bearward Orsin.
- ↑ Hermetic, i.e. chemical. The Hermetical philosophy was so called from Hermes Trismegistus.
- ↑ A banter on the famous sympathetic powder, which was to effect the cure of wounds at a distance, and was much in vogue in the reign of James the First. See Sir Kenelm Digby's "Discourse of the cure of wounds by the powder of sympathy." London, 1644.
- ↑ Useless powders in medicine are called powders of post.
- ↑ That is, heat of the sun. The story of Prometheus is very amusingly told by Dean Swift, in No. 14 of his 'Intelligencer'.
- ↑ Still ridiculing the sympathetic powder. See Sir K. Digby's treatise, where the poet's story of the spit is seriously told.
- ↑ Thus in the first edition; altered in the later ones to "part."
