p to banish the Spaniard, with his tongue intreated
and incited them to persevere in their accustomed
valour and reputation, abasing the enemy and advancing
his nation; condemning their contraries of cowardliness.
and confirming it by the cruelty used with him and other
his companions in their mishaps; showing them his arms
without hands, and naming his brethren whose half feet
they had cut off, because they might be unable to sit on
horseback: with force arguing that if they feared them not.
they would not have used so great inhumanity--for fear
produceth cruelty, the companion of cowardice. Thus
encouraged he them to fight for their lives, limbs, and
liberty, choosing rather to die an honourable death fighting,
than to live in servitude as fruitless members of the
commonwealth. Thus using the office of a sergeant-major, and
having loaden his two stumps with bundles of arrows, he
succoured them who, in the succeeding battle, had their
store wasted; and changing himself from place to place,
animated and encouraged his countrymen with such comfortable
persuasions, as it is reported and credibly believed,
that he did more good with his words and presence,
without striking a stroke, than a great part of the army
did with fighting to the utmost."

It is an action which may take its place by the side
of the myth of Mucius Scaevola, or the real exploit of
that brother of the poet AEschylus, who, when the Persians
were flying from Marathon, clung to a ship till
both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it
with his teeth, leaving his name as a portent even in
the splendid calendar of Athenian heroes. Captain
Bethune, without call or need, making his notes merely,
as he tells us, from the suggestions of his own mind as
he revised the proof-sheets, informs us, at the bottom
of the page, that "it reminds him of the familiar
lines,--

"For Widdrington I needs must wail,
As one in doleful dumps;
For, when his legs were smitten off,
He fought upon his stumps."

It must not avail him, that he has but quoted from the
ballad of Chevy Chase. It is the most deformed stanza *
of the modern deformed version which was composed
in the eclipse of heart and taste, on the restoration of
the Stuarts; and if such verses could then pass for
serious poetry, they have ceased to sound in any ear as
other than a burlesque; the associations which they
arouse are only absurd, and they could only have
continued to ring in his memory thro