Thun.—I’ll give you dash for dash.
Light.—I’ll give you flash for flash.
Gallants, I’ll singe your feather.
Thun.—I’ll Thunder you together.
Both.—Look to’t, look to’t; we’ll do’t, we’ll do’t; look to’t; we’ll do’t.
[Twice or thrice repeated.
Bayes calls this “but a slash of a prologue,” in reply to which, Smith observes, “Yes; ’tis short, indeed, but very terrible.” It is a parody on a scene in “The Slighted Maid,” a play by Sir Robert Stapleton, where Thunder and Lightning were introduced, and their conversation begins in the same words. But the poet has another difficulty on which he desires the opinion of his visitors. “I have made,” he says, “one of the most delicate, dainty similes in the whole world, ’egad, if I knew how to apply it. ’Tis,” he adds, “an allusion to love.” This is the simile—
So boar and sow, when any storm is nigh
Snuff up, and smell it gathering in the sky;
Boar beckons sow to trot in chesnut groves,