United States or Mayotte ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They sally forth, and meet with various adventures, from which they reap no benefit but the sad experience of plentiful rib-roasting. Now if this were all of "Don Quixote," it would be simply broad farce, as it becomes in Butler's parody of it in Sir Hudibras and Ralpho so far as mere external characteristics are concerned.
His puritanic hat, the emblem of that of Ralpho in the prints to Hudibras, or, as he called it, his felt umbrella, was set most knowingly on one side of the head, as if it had been a Spanish hat and feather; his straight square-caped sad-coloured cloak was flung gaily upon one shoulder, as if it had been of three-plied taffeta, lined with crimson silk; and he paraded his huge calf-skin boots, as if they had been silken hose and Spanish leather shoes, with roses on the instep.
Butler's hero is a Presbyterian justice of the peace who sallies forth with his secretary, Ralpho an Independent and Anabaptist-like Don Quixote with Sancho Panza, to suppress May games and bear-baitings. The knight and the squire are discomfited in broadly comic adventures, hardly removed from the rough physical drolleries of a pantomime or circus.
As for the old man, he took it to be the spirit of somebody murdered long ago in this place, which had power granted to forment the assassin in the shape of a raven, and that Ralpho was the name of the said murderer. Although I had not much faith in this interpretation, I was too much troubled to enjoy any sleep: and in all my future adventures never passed a night so ill.
"Forsooth, and is it so?" growled Roger, his scowl relaxing "now will I eat full and blithely, for Ralpho was an arrant knave." Now when his hunger was somewhat assuaged, Roger turned and looked where Beltane lay. "My master sleepeth?" said he, his voice grown gentle. "Nay, Roger, I lie and wait thy news," spake Beltane, his eyes yet closed. "Why then, 'tis war, master battle and siege.
It describes the adventures of a fanatical justice of the peace, Sir Hudibras, and of his squire, Ralpho, in their endeavor to put down all innocent pleasures. In Hudibras and Ralpho the two extreme types of the Puritan party, Presbyterians and Independents, are mercilessly ridiculed.
Alas! sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one." Yet he was himself under the tyranny of scruples as unreasonable as those of Hudibras or Ralpho, and carried his zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical dignities to lengths altogether inconsistent with reason or with Christian charity.
While the noble and the learned were comparing eyes to burning-glasses, and tears to terrestrial globes, coyness to an enthymeme, absence to a pair of compasses, and an unrequited passion to the fortieth remainder-man in an entail, Juliet leaning from the balcony, and Miranda smiling over the chess-board, sent home many spectators, as kind and simple-hearted as the master and mistress of Fletcher's Ralpho, to cry themselves to sleep.
Now, to my mind, though his preferring to be 'a secret agent' to becoming a generalissimo of the Polish cavalry is as modest as it is original, Ralpho is too 'goody-goody' to be called 'the Mysterious. He reminds me, too, in his way of mixing chivalry with self-interest, of those enterprising officers in fighting regiments who send in applications for their own V.C.s while their comrades remain in modest expectation of them.
"News," growled Roger, seating himself at table, "the woods be thick with Pertolepe's rogues seeking my master, rogues known to me each one, that ran to do my bidding aforetime in especial one Ralpho that was my assistant in the dungeons once.
Word Of The Day