BUTLER.

BORN, 1612-DIED, 1680.

BUTLER is the wittiest of English poets, and at the same time he is one of the most learned, and what is more, one of the wisest. His Hudibras, though naturally the most popular of his works from its size, subject, and witty excess, was an accident of birth and party compared with his Miscellaneous Poems; yet both abound in thoughts as great and deep as the surface is sparkling; and his genius altogether, having the additional recommendation of verse, might have given him a fame greater than Rabelais, had his animal spirits been equal to the rest of his qualifications for a universalist. At the same time, though not abounding in poetic sensibility, he was not without it. He is author of the touching simile,

True as the dial to the sun,

Although it be not shin'd upon.

The following is as elegant as anything in Lovelace or Waller :

:

What security's too strong

To guard that gentle heart from wrong,

That to its friend is glad to pass

Itself away, and all it has,

And like an anchorite, gives over

This world, for the heaven of a lover?

And this, if read with the seriousness and singleness of feeling that become it, is, I think, a comparison full of as much grandeur as cordiality,—

Like Indian widows, gone to bed

In flaming curtains to the dead.

You would sooner have looked for it in one of Marvel's poems, than in Hudibras.

Butler has little humour. His two heroes, Hudibras and Ralph, are not so much humourists as pedants. They are as little like their prototypes, Don Quixote and Sancho, as two dreary puppets are unlike excesses of humanity. They are not even consistent with their other prototypes, the Puritans, or with themselves, for they are dull fellows unaccountably gifted with the author's wit. In this respect, and as a narrative, the poem is a failure. Nobody ever thinks of the story, except to wonder at its inefficiency; or of Hudibras himself, except as described at his outset. He is nothing but a ludicrous figure. But considered as a banter issuing from the author's own lips, on the wrong side of Puritanism, and indeed on all the pedantic and hypocritical abuses of human reason, the whole production is a marvellous compound of wit, learn

ing, and felicitous execution. The wit is pure and incessant; the learning as quaint and out-of-the-way as the subject; the very rhymes are echoing scourges, made of the peremptory and the incongruous. This is one of the reasons why the rhymes have been so much admired. They are laughable, not merely in themselves, but from the masterly will and violence with which they are made to correspond to the absurdities they lash. The most extraordinary license is assumed as a matter of course; the accentuation jerked out of its place with all the indifference and effrontery of a reason "sufficing unto itself." The poem is so peculiar in this respect, the laughing delight of the reader so well founded, and the passages so sure to be accompanied with a full measure of wit and knowledge, that I have retained its best rhymes throughout, and thus brought them together for the first time.

Butler, like the great wit of the opposite party, Marvel, was an honest man, fonder of his books than of worldly success, and superior to party itself in regard to final principles. He wrote a satire on the follies and vices of the court, which is most likely the reason why it is doubted whether he ever got anything by Hudibras; and he was so little prejudiced in favour of the scholarship he possessed, that he vindicated the born poet above the poet of books, and would not have Shakspeare tried by a Grecian standard.

DESCRIPTION OF HUDIBRAS AND HIS EQUIPMENTS.

When civil dudgeon first grew high,
And men fell out they knew not why;
When hard words, jealousies, and fears,
Set folks together by the ears,

And made them fight, like mad or drunk,
For dame Religion, as for punk ;'

(Whose honesty they all durst swear for,
Though not a man of them knew wherefore ;)
When gospel-trumpeter, surrounded
With long-ear'd rout, to battle sounded;
And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,

Was beat with fist instead of a stick;
Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling,
And out he rode a colonelling.

A wight he was, whose very sight would
Entitle him Mirror of Knighthood,
That never bow'd his stubborn knee
To anything but chivalry,

Nor put up blow, but that which laid
Right Worshipful on shoulder-blade;
Chief of domestic knights and errant,
Either for chartel* or for warrant;
Great on the bench, great in the saddle,
That could as well bind o'er as swaddle;†
Mighty he was at both of these,
And styl'd of war, as well as peace.
(So some rats, of amphibious nature,

Are either for the land or water).

But here our authors make a doubt,

Whether he were more wise or stout:

* Chartel is a challenge to a duel.

+ Swaddle, to swathe or bind in clothes; hence, to beat or cudgel.

Some hold the one, and some the other,
But, howsoe'er they make a pother,
The difference was so small, his brain
Outweigh'd his rage but half a grain ;
Which made some take him for a tool,
That knaves do work with, call'd a fool.
For 't has been held by many, that
As Montaigne, playing with his cat,
Complains she thought him but an ass,
Much more she would Sir Hudibras
(For that's the name our valiant knight
To all his challenges did write);
But they're mistaken very much;
"T is plain enough he was no such.
We grant, although he had much wit,
H' was very shy of using it,
As being loth to wear it out,
And therefore bore it not about,

Unless on holy-days, or so,

As men their best apparel do.

Besides, 't is known he could speak Greek

As naturally as pigs squeak;

That Latin was no more difficile,

Than to a blackbird 't is to whistle:
Being rich in both, he never scanted
His bounty unto such as wanted;
But much of either would afford
To many that had not one word.

*

He was in logic a great critic, Profoundly skill'd in analytic; He could distinguish and divide

A hair 'twixt south and south-west side;

On either which he would dispute,

Confute, change hands, and still confute.