Doctor Fungus will have it, that cock should be clock, and ground his opinions upon the situation of St. Paul's clock. But this would spoil the poetry of the whole passage. What an accurate picture does the creative pencil of our great poet present to the _mind's eye_! The epithet _lofty_ has fallen through the sieves of all the commentators excepting Theobaldus Secundus. It obviously alludes to the high roosting perch of that valiant bird; nor is the mythological imagery in this sentence to be passed by without its merited eulogium. Lingo, by way of _agreeable surprise_, informs us that the cock is the bird of Pallas--Pallas is the goddess of wisdom, and of course an early riser----
Her favourite bird undoubtedly awoke her with his shrill note, and at the same time roused the slumbering fop Phoebus, who answered in the words of Dr. Watts----
"You have wak'd me too soon, I must slumber again."
and being the god of wit, when he rubbed his own eyes, doubtless vented an imprecation on those of Minerva.
"Thus wit and judgment ever are at strife."--_Pope._
The moral is obvious;--they who, like Mr. Sheridan, aim only to be men of wit, lie a bed; while they who, like Sir Isaac Newton, Mr. Burke, and a very few others, aspire to be men of wisdom, rise with the lark. Horatio in continuation--
"The extravagant and erring spirit hies To his confine."
"The extravagant i. e. got out of his bounds"--_Warburton_--Bravo! old Hurlo-thumbo! got out of his depth, Warburton, you mean. Extra-vagant certainly may be construed out of bounds; we need no ghost with a mouthful of Syntax to tell us that; but Shakspeare had too much taste to adopt such an absurd Latinism. I have no doubt that the late king was a man of expensive habits, and is here compared to a prisoner within the rules of the king's bench, who must return to quod at a given moment or compliment the marshal with the debt and costs. At the crowing of the cock, the extravagant and erring spirit (that is, the spendthrift of a defendant) whether he be drinking arrack punch at Vauxhall, champaigne at the Mount, or brandy and water at the Eccentries, must kick off his glass-slipper, and hobble back to St. George's Fields, like the lame bottle-conjuror of Le Sage.