When the six Thracian ladies fall into the power of “thirty
bloody-minded satyrs,” who so likely, or so happy to rescue them as
jolly St. Patrick. How he flies to the rescue, slays one satyr, puts
the rest to flight, and true as steel, in love or friendship, takes
the half dozen damsels under his arm, and swings singingly along with
them in search of the roving Scot! As for St. David, all this while,
he had not been quite so triumphant, or so tried, as his fellows. He
had fallen into bad company, and “four beautiful damsels wrapped the
drousie champion in a sheet of fine Arabian silk, and conveyed him into
a cave, placed in the middle of a garden, where they laid him on a
bed, more softer than the down of Culvers.” In this agreeable company
the Welsh champion wiled away _his_ seven years. It was pleasant but
not proper. But if the author had not thus disposed of him, how do you
think he would ever have got back to St. George of England? The author
indeed exhibits considerable skill, for he brings St. George and St.
David together, and the first rescues the second from ignoble thraldom,
and what is worse, from the most prosy enchanter I ever met with in
history, and who is really not enchanting at all. This done, George is
off to Tripoli.
There, near there, or somewhere else, for the romances are dreadfully
careless in their topography, he falls in with his old love Sabra,
married to a Moorish King. If George is perplexed at this, seeing that
the lady had engaged to remain an unmarried maiden till he came to wed
her, he is still more so when she informs him that she has, in all
essentials, kept her word, “through the secret virtue of a golden chain
steeped in tiger’s blood, the which she wore seven times double about
her ivory neck.” St. George does not know what to make of it, but as on
subsequently encountering two lions, Sabra, while he was despatching
one, kept the other quietly with its head resting on her lap, the
knight declared himself perfectly satisfied, and they set out upon
their travels, lovingly together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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