Than to be seen with beard and face
By you in such a homely case.[1]
Quoth she, Those need not be asham'd 165
For being honourably maim'd;
If he that is in battle conquer'd
Have any title to his own beard,
Tho' yours be sorely lugg'd and torn,
It does your visage more adorn 170
Than if 'twere prun'd, and starch'd, and lander'd,[2]
And cut square by the Russian standard.[3]
A torn beard's like a tatter'd ensign.
That's bravest which there are most rents in.
That petticoat, about your shoulders, 175
Does not so well become a soldier's;
And I'm afraid they are worse handled,
Altho' i' th' rear your beard the van led;[4]
And those uneasy bruises make
My heart for company to ache, 180
To see so worshipful a friend
I' th' pillory set, at the wrong end.
Quoth Hudibras, This thing call'd pain,[5]
Is, as the learned Stoics maintain,
Not bad simpliciter, nor good,185
But merely as 'tis understood.
- ↑ Var. "Elenctique case," in the first editions.
- ↑ From the French word lavendier, a washer. Wright's Glossary.
- ↑ Peter the Great of Russia had great difficulty in obliging his subjects to cut off their beards, and imposed a tax on them according to a given standard. The beaux in the reigns of James I. and Charles I. spent as much time in dressing their beards as modern beaux do in dressing their hair; and many kept a person to read to him while the operation was performing. See John Taylor, the water poet's Superbiæ Flagellum (Works, p. 3), for a droll account of the fashions of the beard in his time. Bottom, the weaver, was a connoisseur in beards (Mids. Night's Dream, Act i. sc. 2).
- ↑ The van is the front or fore part of an army, and commonly the post of danger and honour; the rear the hinder part. So that making a front in the rear must be retreating from the enemy. By this comical expression the lady signifies that he turned tail on them, by which means his shoulders fared worse than his beard.
- ↑ Some tenets of the Stoic philosophers are here burlesqued with great humour.
