"But trust me, Percy, pity it were
And great offence to kill
Any of these our harmless men,
For they have done no ill.
"Let thou and I the battle try,
And set our men aside."
"Accurst be he," Lord Percy said,
"By whom this is deny'd."
When these brave men had distinguished themselves in the battle and
in single combat with each other, in the midst of a generous parley,
full of heroic sentiments, the Scotch earl falls, and with his dying
words encourages his men to revenge his death, representing to them,
as the most bitter circumstance of it, that his rival saw him fall:
With that there came an arrow keen
Out of an English bow,
Which struck Earl Douglas to the heart
A deep and deadly blow.
Who never spoke more words than these,
"Fight on, my merry men all,
For why, my life is at an end,
Lord Percy sees my fall."
Merry men, in the language of those times, is no more than a
cheerful word for companions and fellow-soldiers. A passage in the
eleventh book of Virgil's "AEneid" is very much to be admired, where
Camilla, in her last agonies, instead of weeping over the wound she
had received, as one might have expected from a warrior of her sex,
considers only, like the hero of whom we are now speaking, how the
battle should be continued after her death:
Tum sic exspirans, &c.
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