and grieve'd, and cut, and came again;--
Pitying, and killing;--
Lamenting sorely for men's souls,
While pretty little eyelet holes,
Clean thro' their bodies he kept drilling:

Till palling on his Laurels, grown so thick,
(As boys pull blackberries, till they are sick,)
Homeward he bent his course, to wreath 'em;
And in his Castle, near fair Norwich town,
Glutted with glory, he sat down,
In perfect solitude, beneath 'em.

Now, sitting under Laurels, Heroes say,
Gives grace, and dignity--and so it may--
When men have done campaigning;
But, certainly, these gentlemen must own
That sitting under Laurels, quite alone,
Is much more dignified than entertaining.

Pious AEneas, who, in his narration
Of his own prowess, felt so great a charm;--
(For, tho' he feign'd great grief in the relation,
He made the story longer than your arm;[4])

Pious AEneas no more pleasure knew
Than did our Knight--who could he pious too--
In telling his exploits, and martial brawls:
But pious _Thomas_ had no Dido near him--
No Queen--King, Lord, nor Commoner to hear him--
So he was force'd to tell them to the walls:

And to his Castle walls, in solemn guise,
The knight, full often, did soliloquize:--

For "Walls have ears," Sir Thomas had been told;
Yet thought the tedious hours would seem much shorter,
If, now and then, a tale he could unfold
To ears of flesh and blood, not stone and mortar.

At length, his old _Castellum_ grew so dull,
That legions of Blue Devils seize'd the Knight;
Megrim invested his belaurell'd skull;
Spleen laid embargoes on his appetite;

Till, thro' the day-time, he was haunted, wholly,
By all the imps of "loathed Melancholy!"--
Heaven keep her, and her imps, for ever, from us!--
An Incubus,[5] whene'er he went to bed,
Sat on his stomach, like a lump of lead,
Making unseemly faces at Sir Thomas.

Plagues such as these might make a Parson swear;
Sir Thomas being but a Layman,
Swore, very roundly, _a la militaire_,
Or, rather, (from vexation) like a Drayman:

Damning his Walls, out of all line and level;
Sinking his drawbridges and moats;
Wishing that he were cutting throats--
And they were at the devil.

"What's to be done," Sir Thomas said one day,
"To drive _Ennui_ away?
How is the evil to be parried?