His sentiments and actions are every way suitable to a hero. “One of us two,” says he, “must die: I am an earl as well as yourself, so that you can have no pretence for refusing the combat; however,” says he, “it is pity, and indeed would be a sin, that so many innocent men should perish for our sakes: rather let you and I end our quarrel in single fight:”
“Ere thus I will out-braved be,
One of us two shall die;
I know thee well, an earl thou art,
Lord Percy, so am I.“But trust me, Percy, pity it were
And great offence to kill
Any of these our harmless men,
For they have done no ill.“Let thou and I the battle try,
And set our men aside.”
“Accurst be he,” Lord Percy said,
“By whom this is deny’d.”
When these brave men had distinguished themselves in the battle and in single combat with each other, in the midst of a generous parley, full of heroic sentiments, the Scotch earl falls, and with his dying words encourages his men to revenge his death, representing to them, as the most bitter circumstance of it, that his rival saw him fall:
With that there came an arrow keen
Out of an English bow,
Which struck Earl Douglas to the heart
A deep and deadly blow.Who never spoke more words than these,
“Fight on, my merry men all,
For why, my life is at an end,
Lord Percy sees my fall.”
Merry men, in the language of those times, is no more than a cheerful word for companions and fellow-soldiers. A passage in the eleventh book of Virgil’s “Æneid” is very much to be admired, where Camilla, in her last agonies, instead of weeping over the wound she had received, as one might have expected from a warrior of her sex, considers only, like the hero of whom we are now speaking, how the battle should be continued after her death:
Tum sic exspirans, &c.
Virg., Æn. xi. 820.
A gath’ring mist o’erclouds her cheerful eyes;
And from her cheeks the rosy colour flies,
Then turns to her, whom of her female train
She trusted most, and thus she speaks with pain:
“Acca, ’tis past! he swims before my sight,
Inexorable Death, and claims his right.
Bear my last words to Turnus; fly with speed
And bid him timely to my charge succeed;
Repel the Trojans, and the town relieve:
Farewell.”Dryden.
Turnus did not die in so heroic a manner, though our poet seems to have had his eye upon Turnus’s speech in the last verse:
Lord Percy sees my fall.
—Vicisti, et victum tendere palmas
Ausonii vidêre.Virg., Æn. xii. 936.
The Latin chiefs have seen me beg my life.
Dryden.