No help from fathers or tradition's train: How can she censure, or what crime pretend, Thus is the Panther neither loved nor feared, A mere mock queen of a divided herd; Whom soon by lawful power she might controul, Then, as the moon who first receives the light * Note XIV. ** Big with the beams which from her mother flow, One evening, while the cooler shade she sought, Since they would go, before them wisely went That is, if the church of England would be reconciled to Rome, she should be gratified with a delegated portion of innate authority over the rival sectaries; instead of being obliged to depend upon the civil power for protection. Alluding to the exercise of the dispensing power, and the Declaration of Indulgence, And drank a sober draught; the rest, amazed, Stood mutely still, and on the stranger gazed; Surveyed her part by part, and sought to find The ten-horned monster in the harmless Hind, Such as the Wolf and Panther had designed. † They thought at first they dreamed; for twas offence With them, to question certitude of sense, Their guide in faith: but nearer when they drew, And had the faultless object full in view, Lord, how they all admired her heavenly hue! Some, who, before, her fellowship disdained, Scarce, and but scarce, from in-born rage restrained, Now frisked about her, and old kindred feigned. Whether for love or interest, every sect Of all the savage nation shewed respect. The viceroy Panther could not awe the herd; The more the company, the less they feared. The surly Wolf with secret envy burst, Yet could not howl; (the Hind had seen him first;) But what he durst not speak, the Panther durst. For when the herd, sufficed, did late repair To ferny heaths, and to their forest lair, She made a mannerly excuse to stay, Proffering the Hind to wait her half the way; + The ten-horned monster, in the Revelations, was usually explained by the reformers as typical of the church of Rome. There was a classical superstition, that, if a wolf saw a man before he saw the wolf, the person lost his voice : -vorque Marin Jam fugit ipsa: lupi Mærin videre priores. Dryden has adopted, in the text, the converse of this superstitious belief. That, since the sky was clear, an hour of talk Which well she hoped, might be with ease redressed, Considering her a well-bred civil beast, + Although the Roman Catholic plot was made the pretence of persecuting the Papists in the first instance, yet the high-flying party of the Church of England were also levelled at, and accused of being Tantivies, Papists in masquerade, &c. &c. NOTES ON THE HIND AND THE PANTHER, PART I. Note I. And doomed to death, though fated not to die.---P. 119. The critics fastened on this line with great exultation, concluding, that doomed and fated mean precisely the same thing. "Faith, Mr Bayes," says one of these gentlemen, "if you were doomed to be hanged, whatever you were fated to 'twould give you but small comfort." This criticism is quite erroneous; doom, in its general acceptation, meaning merely a sentence of any kind, the pronouncing which by no means necessarily implies its execution. In the criminal courts of Scotland, the sentence is always concluded with this formula," and this I pronounce for doom." Till of late years, a special officer recited the sentence after the judge, and was thence called the doomster, † an office now performed by the clerk of court. The criticism is founded on the word doom having been often, and even generally, used as synonimous to the sentence of heaven, and therefore inevitable. But in the text, it Hind and Panther Transversed. This office was usually held by the executioner, who, to this extent, was a pluralist; and the change was chiefly made, to prevent the necessity of producing that person in court, to the aggravation of the criminal's terrors. |