LXVI.
Make to thy reason, man, and mock thy doubts,
Looke how below thy feares their causes are;
Thou art a souldier, Herod; send thy scouts,
See how Hee's furnish't for so fear'd a warre?
What armour does He weare? A few thin clouts.
His trumpets? tender cries; His men to dare
So much? rude shepheards: what His steeds? alas
Poore beasts! a slow oxe and a simple asse.
Il fine del primo Libro.
NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
See our Essay for critical remarks on the original and Crashaw's interpretation. These things may be recorded:
St. viii. line 6. '(His shop of flames) he fries himself.' This verb 'fries,' like 'stick' and some others, had not in Elizabethan times and later, that colloquial, and therefore in such a context ludicrous, sound that it has to us. In Marlowe's or Jonson's translation of Ovid's fifteenth elegy (book i.) the two lines which originally ran thus,
'Lofty Lucretius shall live that hour
That Nature shall dissolve this earthly bower,'
were afterwards altered by Jonson himself to,
'Then shall Lucretius' lofty numbers die,
When earth and seas in fire and flame shall frie.'
In another way one of our most ludicrous-serious experiences of printers' errors was in a paper contributed by us to an American religious periodical. The subject was Affliction, and we remarked that God still, as of old with the 'three children' (so-called) permits His people to be put into the furnace of 'fiery trials,' wherein He tries them whether they be ore or dross. To our horror we found the t changed into f, and so read sensationally 'fries'—all the worse that some might think it the author's own word.