And th' other mongrel vermin, Ralph,
That brav'd us all in his behalf.280
Thy bear is safe, and out of peril,
Tho' lugg'd indeed, and wounded very ill;
Myself and Trulla made a shift
To help him out at a dead lift;
And having brought him bravely off,285
Have left him where he's safe enough:
There let him rest; for if we stay,
The slaves may hap to get away.
This said, they all engag'd to join
Their forces in the same design,290
And forthwith put themselves, in search
Of Hudibras, upon their march:
Where leave we them awhile, to tell
What the victorious Knight befell;
For such, Crowdero being fast295
In dungeon shut, we left him last.
Triumphant laurels seem'd to grow
Nowhere so green as on his brow;
Laden with Avhich, as well as tir'd
With conqu'ring toil, he now retir'd300
Unto a neighb'ring castle by,
To rest his body, and apply
Fit med'cines to each glorious bruise
He got in fight, reds, blacks, and blues;
To mollify th' uneasy pang305
Of ev'ry honourable bang.
Which b'ing by skilful midwife drest,
He laid him down to take his rest.
But all in vain: he 'ad got a hurt
O' th' inside, of a deadlier sort,310
By Cupid made, who took his stand
Upon a widow's jointure-land,[1]
- ↑ The widow is presumed by Grey to be Mrs Tomson, who had a jointure of £200 a year. The courtship appears to be a fact dressed up by Butler's humour (although the editor of 1819 thinks it apocryphal) from Walker's History of Independency, i. p. 170. We learn tbat Sir Samuel Luke, to repair his decayed estate, sighed for the widow's jointure, but met with fatal obstacles in his suit, for she was a mere coquet, and, what was worse as regarded her suitor's principles, she was a royalist. Her inexorableness, says Mr Walker, was eventually the cause of the knight's death.
