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PART I.CANTO III.
Y me! what perils do environ
The man that meddles with cold iron![1]
What plaguy mischiefs and mishaps
Do dog him still with afterclaps!
For tho' dame Fortune seem to smile,5
And leer upon him for a while,
She'll after show him, in the nick
Of all his glories, a dog-trick.
This any man may sing or say
I' th' ditty call'd, "What if a day?[2]10
For Hudibras, who thought he'd won
The field as certain as a gun,[3]
And having routed the whole troop,
With victory was cock-a-hoop;[4]
- ↑ A parody on Spenser's verses:
Ay me, how many perils do enfold
The virtuous man to make him daily fall.
Fairy Queen: Book i. canto 8.
These two lines are become a kind of proverbial expression, partly owing to the moral reflection, and partly to the jingle of the double rhyme: they are applied sometimes to a man mortally wounded with a sword, and sometimes to a lady who pricks her finger with a needle. It was humorously applied by the Cambridge wits to Jeffreys, on the publication of Lord Byron's "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." Butler, in his MS. Common Place-book, on this passage, observes: "Cold iron in Greenland burns as grievously as hot." Some editions read "Ah me." - ↑ An old ballad, which begins:
What if a day, or a month, or a year
Crown thy delights,
With a thousand wish't contentings!
Cannot the chance of a night or an hour,
Cross thy delights,
With as many sad tormentings? - ↑ The first edition reads: Suer as a gun.
- ↑ That is, crowing or rejoicing. Handbook of Proverbs, p. 154.
