"
The comic poets will also occasionally borrow a classical
allusion. The following is from Swift's "Description of a City
Shower":
"Boxed in a chair the beau impatient sits,
While spouts run clattering o'er the roof by fits,
And ever and anon with frightful din
The leather sounds; he trembles from within.
So when Troy chairmen bore the wooden steed
Pregnant with Greeks impatient to be freed,
(Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do,
Instead of paying chairmen, run them through);
Laocoon struck the outside with a spear,
And each imprisoned champion quaked with fear."
King Priam lived to see the downfall of his kingdom and was slain
at last on the fatal night when the Greeks took the city. He had
armed himself and was about to mingle with the combatants, but was
prevailed on by Hecuba, his aged queen, to take refuge with
herself and his daughters as a suppliant at the altar of Jupiter.
While there, his youngest son Polites, pursued by Pyrrhus, the son
of Achilles, rushed in wounded, and expired at the feet of his
father; whereupon Priam, overcome with indignation, hurled his
spear with feeble hand against Pyrrhus, [Footnote 1: Pyrrhus's
exclamation, "Not such aid nor such defenders does the time
require," has become proverbial.
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