Shall both enhearse this blood unnobly spilt,
And live, till all her towers in rubbish lie,
The monuments of their base cruelty.
Elegy on Sir Charles Lucas, &c.] This, King's longest poem (except the King Charles), shows, like the preceding, a vigour which might have made him a very formidable political satirist. If he has not Cleveland's wit he is free from Cleveland's abuse of it. The subject is again a well-known one. No impartial authority denies that the execution of Lucas and Lisle was one of the worst blots on that side of the record of the Rebellion, and perhaps the only unforgivable act of Fairfax. Whether he was actuated, as the Royalists generally believed, by a mean personal spite, or allowed himself to be the tool of Ireton, matters uncommonly little; and his own 'Vindication' contains statements demonstrably false. However, as usual in revolutions, the curse came home, and the Colchester 'Septemberings' (as they would actually have been had the New Style prevailed in England) were undoubtedly as much instrumental as anything, next to the execution of the King himself, in turning the national sentiment against the perpetrators. The bracketed notes that follow are, as usual, original.
31 [Sir George Lisle at Newbury charged in his shirt, and routed them.] This was the second battle of Newbury, October 27, 1644: he was knighted at Oxford, December 21, 1645.
49 friend] [Patroclus.]
60 Mercy] Fairfax in his own 'Vindication' admits the 'snare'. 'Delivering upon Mercy is to be understood that some are to suffer, the rest to go free.' In other words, the garrison might take 'mercy' to mean 'quarter', but Fairfax took it to mean 'discretion'.
64 Orig. 'President', as often printed, though of course no scholar like King would deliberately write it.
66 [Famagosta, defended most valiantly by Signior Bragadino in the time of Selimus II, was upon honourable terms surrendered to Mustapha the Bashaw, who, observing no conditions, at his tent murdered the principal commanders, invited thither under show of love, and flayed Bragadine alive.] This siege of Famagosta in 1571, which came just before, and may be said to have been revenged by, Lepanto, greatly affected the mind of Christendom, and is duly chronicled in Knolles, the chief English historical writer of King's day. It is therefore hardly necessary to suppose, with Hannah, that the note was abridged from George Sandys' Travels, though King and Sandys were certainly friends.
82, 85 I would have left the capitals for the 'Yous' in these lines, as I have already done in other places, because they not improperly further emphasize that emphatic use of the pronoun in different parts of the line which Dryden afterwards perfected. But unfortunately they are not uniformly used, or even in the majority of cases—which shows how utterly haphazard and irrational this capitalization was.