MAMMON:
Yet our tickets
Are seldom blanks. But what steps have you taken? _130
For prophecies, when once they get abroad,
Like liars who tell the truth to serve their ends,
Or hypocrites who, from assuming virtue,
Do the same actions that the virtuous do,
Contrive their own fulfilment. This Iona— _135
Well—you know what the chaste Pasiphae did,
Wife to that most religious King of Crete,
And still how popular the tale is here;
And these dull Swine of Thebes boast their descent
From the free Minotaur. You know they still _140
Call themselves Bulls, though thus degenerate,
And everything relating to a Bull
Is popular and respectable in Thebes.
Their arms are seven Bulls in a field gules;
They think their strength consists in eating beef,— _145
Now there were danger in the precedent
If Queen Iona—
NOTES:
_114 the edition 1820; thy cj. Forman;
cf. Motto below Title, and II. i, 153-6. ticket? edition 1820;
ticket! edition 1839.
_135 their own Mrs. Shelley, later editions;
their editions 1820 and 1839.
PURGANAX:
I have taken good care
That shall not be. I struck the crust o’ the earth
With this enchanted rod, and Hell lay bare!
And from a cavern full of ugly shapes _150
I chose a LEECH, a GADFLY, and a RAT.
The Gadfly was the same which Juno sent
To agitate Io, and which Ezekiel mentions
That the Lord whistled for out of the mountains
Of utmost Aethiopia, to torment _155
Mesopotamian Babylon. The beast
Has a loud trumpet like the scarabee,
His crooked tail is barbed with many stings,
Each able to make a thousand wounds, and each
Immedicable; from his convex eyes _160
He sees fair things in many hideous shapes,
And trumpets all his falsehood to the world.
Like other beetles he is fed on dung—
He has eleven feet with which he crawls,
Trailing a blistering slime, and this foul beast _165
Has tracked Iona from the Theban limits,
From isle to isle, from city unto city,
Urging her flight from the far Chersonese
To fabulous Solyma, and the Aetnean Isle,
Ortygia, Melite, and Calypso’s Rock, _170
And the swart tribes of Garamant and Fez,
Aeolia and Elysium, and thy shores,
Parthenope, which now, alas! are free!
And through the fortunate Saturnian land,
Into the darkness of the West.
NOTES: (_153 (Io) The Promethetes Bound of Aeschylus.—[SHELLEY’S NOTE.]) (_153 (Ezekiel) And the Lord whistled for the gadfly out of Aethiopia, and for the bee of Egypt, etc.—EZEKIEL.—[SHELLEY’S NOTE.])
MAMMON:
But if _175
This Gadfly should drive Iona hither?
PURGANAX:
Gods! what an IF! but there is my gray RAT:
So thin with want, he can crawl in and out
Of any narrow chink and filthy hole,
And he shall creep into her dressing-room, _180
And—
MAMMON:
My dear friend, where are your wits? as if
She does not always toast a piece of cheese
And bait the trap? and rats, when lean enough
To crawl through SUCH chinks—
PURGANAX:
But my LEECH—a leech
Fit to suck blood, with lubricous round rings, _185
Capaciously expatiative, which make
His little body like a red balloon,
As full of blood as that of hydrogen,
Sucked from men’s hearts; insatiably he sucks
And clings and pulls—a horse-leech, whose deep maw _190
The plethoric King Swellfoot could not fill,
And who, till full, will cling for ever.
MAMMON:
This
For Queen Jona would suffice, and less;
But ’tis the Swinish multitude I fear,
And in that fear I have—
PURGANAX:
Done what?