They have stricken me, [shalt thou say, and] I was not sick; they have beaten me, [and] I felt [it] not: when shall I awake? I will seek it yet again.
Ver. 35. They have stricken me.] A drunken man, we say, takes no hurt, feels no smart, is turned into a very stock. Dionysius the Heracleot felt not needles thrust into his fat belly. Pliny mentioneth certain bears, that being sound asleep, cannot be wakened with the sharpest prickles. Mathiolus a reports of the asses of Etruria, that, feeding upon henbane, b they fall into such a dead sleep, that being taken for dead, they are half hideled, c ere they can be aroused. Lo, such is the drunkard's lethargy; neither is he more insensible than sensual and irrecoverable.
a Mathiol. in Dioscorid.
b The common name of the annual plant Hyoscyamus niger, a native of Europe and northern Asia, growing on waste ground, having dull yellow flowers streaked with purple, viscid stem and leaves, unpleasant smell, and narcotic and poisonous properties; also extended to the genus as a whole.
c [?Skinned.]