Samuel Butler, grievously miscalled “the Hogarth of Poetry,” seems to have been mainly a self-taught man. After leaving Worcester Cathedral School he started in life as justice’s clerk to a Mr. Jeffries, at Earl’s Croome. He was next at Wrest in Bedfordshire, in the service of the Countess of Kent, and here he met and worked for John Selden. Finally he formed part of the household of Sir Samuel Luke, a Presbyterian Colonel, “scout-master for Bedfordshire and governor of Newport Pagnell.” At the Restoration he was made Secretary to the President of Wales and steward of Ludlow Castle, and in 1662, at full fifty years old, he published the first part of the immense lampoon whose authorship has given him his place in English letters. The second part of “Hudibras” was issued in 1663; the third in 1678. Two years afterwards Butler died. During his lifetime Butler published but the three parts of “Hudibras,” a couple of pamphlets, and an ode on the exploits and renown of the illustrious Claude Duval, which last, in its grave extravagance of irony, is, by anticipation, not unsuggestive of Fielding’s “Jonathan Wild.” Three volumes of “Remains,” mostly spurious, were published in 1715; but in 1759 Thyer of Manchester put forth a couple of volumes of prose and verse selected from Butler’s manuscripts, and these, with some scraps printed later on, are all that is known to exist of him.

Personal

	M. S.
	Samuelis Butleri,
	Qui Strenshamiæ in agro Vigorn natus 1612,
	Obiit Lond. 1680.
	Vir doctus imprimis, acer, integer;
	Operibus Ingenii, non item præmiis felix:
	Satyrici apud nos Carminis Artifex egregius;
	Quo simulatæ Religioni Larvam detraxit,
	Et Perduellium scelera liberrime exagitavit:
	Scriptorum in suo genere Primus, et Prostremus.
	Ne, cui vivo deerant fere omnia,
	Deesset etiam Mortuo Tumulus,
	Hoc tandem posio marmore curavit
	Johannes Barber, Civis Londinensis, 1721.

  This little monument was erected in the year 1786, by some of the parishioners of Covent Garden, in memory of the celebrated Samuel Butler, who was buried in this church, A.D. 1680.

	A few plain men, to pomp and state unknown,
	O’er a poor bard have rais’d this humble stone,
	Whose wants alone his genius could surpass,
	Victim of zeal! the matchless Hudibras!
	What though fair freedom suffer’d in his page,
	Reader, forgive the author for the age!
	How few, alas! disdain to cringe and cant,
	When ’tis the mode to play the sycophant.
	But, oh! let all be taught, from Butler’s fate,
	Who hope to make their fortunes by the great,
	That wit and pride are always dangerous things,
	And little faith is due to courts and kings.

  He is of a middle stature, strong sett, high coloured, a head of sorrell haire, a severe and sound judgement: a good fellowe. He haz often sayd that way (e.g. Mr. Edmund Waller’s) of quibling with sence will hereafter growe as much out of fashion and be as ridicule as quibling with words—quod N. B. He haz been much troubled with the gowt, and particularly 1679, he stirred not out of his chamber from October till Easter.

Obiit Anno: Domini 1680/circiter 70.

He dyed of a consumption September 25; and buried 27, according to his appointment, in the churchyard of Convent Garden; scil. in the north part next the church at the east end. His feet touch the wall. His grave, 2 yards distant from the pillaster of the dore, (by his desire) 6 foot deepe. About 25 of his old acquaintance at his funerall. I myself being one [of the eldest, helped to carry the pall with Tom Shadwell, at the foot, Sir Robert Thomas and Mr. Saunders, esq., at the head; Dr. Cole and Dr. Davenant, middle].

	On Butler who can think without just Rage,
	The Glory and the Scandal of the Age?
	Fair stood his hopes, when first he came to Town,
	Met every where with welcome of Renown,
	Courted, and lov’d by all, with wonder read,
	And promises of Princely Favour fed:
	But what Reward for all had he at last,
	After a Life in dull expectance pass’d?
	The Wretch at summing up his mis-spent days
	Found nothing left, but Poverty and Praise:
	Of all his Gains by Verse he could not save
	Enough to purchase Flannel, and a Grave:
	Reduc’d to want, he in due time fell sick,
	Was fain to die, and be interr’d on tick:
	And well might bless the Fever that was sent,
	To rid him hence, and his worse Fate prevent.

  This Samuel Butler, who was a boon and witty companion, especially among the company he knew well, died of a consumption, September 25th, 1680, and was, according to his desire, buried six foot deep in the yard belonging to the Church of S. Paul in Covent-Garden within the liberty of Westminster, viz. at the west end of the said yard, on the north side, and under the wall, of the church; and under that wall which parts the yard from the common high-way.

  Did not the celebrated author of “Hudibras” bring the King’s enemies into lower contempt with the sharpness of his wit than all the terrors of his administration could reduce them to? Was not his book always in the pocket of the prince? And what did the mighty prowess of this knight-errant amount to? Why, he died, with the highest esteem of the court, in a garret.

  In this mist of obscurity passed the life of Butler, a man whose name can only perish with his language. The mode and place of his education are unknown; the events of his life are variously related; and all that can be told with certainty is, that he was poor.

  The house of his birth was standing till very recently; but in 1873 was pulled down, as no longer tenantable.

  Butler was buried in the yard of St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden; but contemporary authorities differ as to the exact position of his grave…. A tablet to the memory of Butler was placed on the south side of the church “by the inhabitants of the parish” in 1786, nine years before the old edifice was destroyed by fire. It was not renewed when the church was rebuilt; and the clerk of the vestry in 1885 had no knowledge of it, or of the position of Butler’s grave. The churchyard has been levelled and covered with grass, where it is not paved with fragments of the old tombstones it used to contain, and few memorials to its illustrious dead are now to be found.

Hudibras

  To St. Paul’s Church Yard to my booksellers … choose … “Hudibras,” both parts, the book now in greatest fashion for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies.

  CHARLES R. Our will and pleasure is and we do hereby strictly charge and command, that no printer, bookseller, stationer, or other person whatsoever within our kindgom of England or Ireland, do print, reprint, utter or sell, or cause to be printed, reprinted, uttered or sold, a book or poem called “Hudibras,” or any part thereof, without the consent and approbation of Samuel Boteler, Esq. or his assignees, as they and every of them will answer the contrary at their perils. Given at our Court at Whitehall, the tenth day of September, in the year of our Lord God 1677, and in the 29th year of our reign. By his Majesty’s command.

  The worth of his poem is too well known to need my commendation, and he is above my censure. His satire is of the Varronian kind, though unmixed with prose. The choice of his numbers is suitable enough to his design, as he has managed it; but in any other hand, the shortness of his verse, and the quick returns of rhyme, had debased the dignity of style.

  If “Hudibras” had been set out with as much wit and humour in heroic verse as he is in doggerel he would have made a much more agreeable figure than he does; though the generality of his readers are so wonderfully pleased with the double rhymes, that I do not expect many will be of my opinion in this particular.

  Butler set out on too narrow a plan, and even that design is not kept up. He sinks into little true particulars about the Widow, &c.—The enthusiastic Knight, and the ignorant Squire, over-religious in two different ways, and always quarrelling together, is the chief point of view in it.

  Burlesque may perhaps be divided into such as turns chiefly on the thought and such as depends more on the expression, or we may add a third kind, consisting in thoughts ridiculously dressed, in language much above or below their dignity. “The Splendid Shilling” of Phillips, and the “Hudibras” of Butler are the most obvious instances. Butler, however, depended much on the ludicrous effect of his double rhymes; in other respects, to declare your sentiments, he is rather a witty writer, than a humorous one.

  Butler stands without a rival in burlesque poetry. His “Hudibras” is, in its kind, almost as great an effort of genius as the “Paradise Lost” itself. It abounds with uncommon learning, new rhymes, and original thoughts. Its images are truly and naturally ridiculous: we are never shocked with excessive distortion nor grimace; nor is human nature degraded to that of monkeys and yahoos. There are in it many strokes of temporary satire, and some characters and allusions which cannot be discovered at this distance of time.

  The poem of “Hudibras” is one of those compositions of which a nation may justly boast, as the images which it exhibits are domestick, the sentiments unborrowed and unexpected, and the strain of diction original and peculiar.

	Unrivall’d Butler! Blest with happy skill
	To heal by comic verse each serious ill,
	By Wit’s strong lashes Reason’s light dispense,
	And laugh a frantic nation into sense!

  Concerning “Hudibras” there is but one sentiment—it is universally allowed to be the first and last poem of its kind; the learning, wit, and humour, certainly stand unrivalled: various have been the attempts to describe and define the two last…. If any one wishes to know what wit and humour are, let him read “Hudibras” with attention; he will there see them displayed in the brightest colours: there is lustre resulting from the quick elucidation of an object by a just and unexpected arrangement of it with another subject: propriety of words, and thoughts elegantly adapted to the occasion: objects which possess an affinity and congruity, or sometimes a contrast to each other, assembled with quickness and variety; in short, every ingredient of wit, or of humour, which critics have discovered on dissecting them, may be found in this poem.

  The perpetual scintillation of Butler’s wit is too dazzling to be delightful; and we can seldom read far in “Hudibras” without feeling more fatigue than pleasure. His fancy is employed with the profusion of a spendthrift, by whose eternal round of banqueting his guests are at length rather wearied out than regaled.

  There are some excellent moral and even serious lines in “Hudibras;” but what if a clergyman should adorn his sermon with a quotation from that poem! Would the abstract propriety of the verse leave him “honourably acquitted?”

  Matchless Hudibras.

  The “Hudibras” of Butler, like the fabled Arabian bird, is in itself a species: it had no precursor, and its imitators are forgotten. With all the disadvantages of a temporary subject, obsolete characters, and “a conclusion in which nothing is concluded,” it continues to be the delight of the few, and the text-book of the many: its couplets have passed into proverbs—the names of its heroes are “familiar in our mouths as household words.” With the exception of Shakspeare, there is, perhaps, no author whose expressions are so inextricably intertwined with our everyday discourse, and whose writings afford such an inexhaustible variety of apothegms of universal and apposite application; yet there is no author, enjoying any considerable share of popularity, who is so imperfectly understood and appreciated.

  The construction of the story, and the delineation of the characters, have been praised far beyond their merits. In these particulars it has very slender claims to originality.

  The defect of Butler’s poem undoubtedly consists in … the poverty of the incidents, and the incompleteness and irregularity of the design. The slender strain of narrative which is just visible in the commencement, soon dwindles away and is lost. It is true that the poem abounds with curious and uncommon learning, with original thoughts, happy images, quaint and comic turns of expression, and new and fanciful rhymes. But the humour, instead of being diffused quietly and unostentatiously over the whole poem, in rich harmonious colouring, is collected into short epigrammatic sentences, pointed apothegms, and unexpected allusions. It has the same merits and defects as a poem of a very different kind—Young’s “Night Thoughts,”—copious invention, new and pleasing images, and brilliant thoughts; with a want of sufficient connexion in the subject, and progress in the story.

  His reading and illustration are all out of the way; and his manner, dry and crabbed at one time, flowing and free and popular at another. I should call him, therefore, a humorist, not only in the literary sense, but in the sense in which we apply the word to one who has some strong peculiarity of character, which he indulges, in whims, in oddities, in comic extravagances, according to the bent of his inclination. There is a kind of likeness between Butler and old Burton of the “Anatomy of Melancholy.” Both men had various and unusual reading; both were at once comic and grave; and both, amidst wild and homely pleasantry, shoot out flashes of thought and fancy which are equal to the efforts of anybody…. Among humorous writers he must always occupy a very high place. He is a thinker, old Butler, as you see through all his odd comic poem; while as a man of wit, it would be perhaps impossible to name one in whom wit is so absolutely redundant.

  It is rather curious to remember that the two best burlesque poems in the English language, “Hudibras” and “Don Juan,” are both fragments; and that, in reference to the first of these, at least, we have not the most distant data to guide us in conjecturing what was the ultimate plan or purpose of the poet, beyond, at least, the very probable conjecture that his vigorous and unsparing satire would have swept at least into the ranks of the ungrateful cavaliers. As it is, “Hudibras” now stands before us—not a sublime, unfinished temple consecrated to deities, whose worship was never to be celebrated therein—but a great, grotesque, nameless structure, reared half in sport and half in earnest, which excites in the mind of those who walk in it rather laughter than love, rather wonder than satisfaction, and which, after all the explanations given is far more a problem than a poem.

	I love all beauty: I can go
	At times from Gainsborough to Watteau;
	Even after Milton’s thorough-bass
	I hear the rhymes of Hudibras,
	And find more solid wisdom there
	Than pads professor’s easy chair.

  An old affection for “Hudibras,” acquired nearly half a century ago, at a time when its piquant couplets were still familiarly quoted, had long impressed him [me] with the desire to publish a really popular edition.

  Butler’s power of arguing in verse, in his own way, may almost be put on a par with Dryden’s in his; and, perseveringly as he devotes himself upon system to the exhibition of the ludicrous and grotesque, he sometimes surprises us with a sudden gleam of the truest beauty of thought and expression breaking out from the midst of the usual rattling fire of smartnesses and conundrums,—as when in one place he exclaims of a thin cloud drawn over the moon—

	Misterious veil; of brightness made,
	At once her lustre and her shade!

He must also be allowed to tell his story and to drew his characters well, independently of his criticisms.

  There is hardly another poem in the language which carries so essentially distinct a style of its own. It is at once comic, pointed, and precise, continually surprising the reader with its vivacity and freshness, to the success of which its doggrel verse and odd rhymes no doubt contribute.

  How mean is the wit, with what awkwardness and dulness he dilutes his splenetic satire! Here and there lurks a happy picture, the remnant of a poetry which has just perished; but the whole material of the work reminds one of a Scarron, as unworthy as the other, and more malignant…. No action, no nature, all is would-be satire and gross caricature; neither art, nor harmony, nor good taste: the Puritan style is converted into a harsh gibberish; and the engalled rancour, missing its aim by its more excess, spoils the portrait it wishes to draw. Would you believe that such a writer gives himself airs, wishes to enliven us, pretends to be funny?

  A poem which the finest wits of his own age, and the finest wits of every age and country to the present time, have concurred in pronouncing the wittiest composition, integrally, that was ever penned. If the story or substructure of this remarkable work had been of more fanciful character, with variety and surprises in the development, and the subject of it more general, and applicable to universal humanity—its causes and effects of action—I believe I may state without fear of contradiction, that it would have stood pre-eminent and unrivalled…. Nothing can exceed the slashing style in which this great writer rips open and exposes to view the hypocritical pretensions of the objects of his ridicule, and the proof of it is, that the book has furnished texts and mottoes to the opponents of bigotry and fanaticisms of all descriptions—whether ecclesiastical or civil—to the present day.

  Butler, in his “Hudibras,” poured insult on the past with a pedantic buffoonery for which the general hatred, far more than its humor, secured a hearing.

  Although the merits of “Hudibras” have, in our opinion, been exaggerated, because largely taken on trust, yet no one can question the power and merit of the poem. It is a rough, strong, grotesque satire, full of point and force, and did more to put the defects of Puritanism in a ridiculous and glaring light and give popular currency to their faults, real and supposed, than anything which has ever been written. The terse and stinging sentences of the mock epic were in every one’s mouth; but their author lived and died a neglected and morose man, bequeathing a volume of posthumous papers, full of bitter flings against mankind.

  “Hudibras” is none the less as notable in these days as it was at the epoch of its birth. It has been more largely read and quoted than almost any book in the language. It contains the best and brightest of Butler, and is a perfect reflex of his mind and temper.

  Every good cause has its Hudibras. Butler wrote, no doubt, as a partisan, but his whole war was against hypocrisy. Against that in every form he waged his war, though putting into the central place what he regarded as the worst hypocrisy of all. But he aimed also his shafts of wit against false show of courage; pedantry of learning: the false conventions of love poetry; the worldliness of love; pretensions of false science; delusive aids of law. Had he completed the book, he would have left few of the shams of life untouched. To the weak side of Law and Divinity he would, no doubt, have added the weak side of Physic, when time came for summoning the Doctor to despatch his knight. An attentive reader of “Hudibras” will not be more impressed by its wit, than by the breadth of its plan.

  The poem is a curio of letters—a specimen of literary bric-à-brac—an old, ingeniously enamelled snuff-box, with dirty pictures within the lid.

  The book is a very great book. Its wonderful skill of doggerel verse and acrobatic rhyme, the inexhaustible abundance of its fantastic imagery, its learning, its fancy, its pictorial skill—great as they all are—yield, perhaps, to the fashion in which the persons, things, systems ridiculed are made to render themselves ridiculous—to the pitiless mastery with which the puppets work out their own failure and contempt. There are many more lovely books of English literature than “Hudibras;” there are, perhaps, not so many of which it can be said that they are intellectually greater.

  It was greatly relished, and though it is a barbarous and ribald production of small literary value, it is still praised, and perhaps occasionally read. It affords rare opportunities for quotation, every few pages containing a line or couplet of considerable facetiousness. “Hudibras” was incessantly imitated, and the generic term Hudibrastics was invented for this kind of daring doggerel. Butler, however, is a mere episode.

General

  Butler was suffered to die in a garret, Otway in an alehouse, Nat Lee in the street. And yet Butler was a whole species of poets in one; admirable in a manner in which no one else has been tolerable; a manner which began and ended in him, in which he knew no guide and has found no followers.

	He, consummate master, knew
	When to recede, and where pursue;
	His noble negligences teach
	What others’ toils despair to reach.
	He, perfect dancer, climbs the rope,
	And balances your fear and hope:
	If, after some distinguish’d leap,
	He drops his pole, and seems to slip,
	Straight gathering all his active strength,
	He rises higher half his length.
	With wonder you approve his sleight;
	And owe your pleasure to your fright.

  There was something singular in this same Butler. Besides an infinite deal of wit, he had great sense and penetration, both in the sciences and the world. Yet with all this, he could never plan a work, nor tell a story well. The first appears from his “Hudibras,” the other from his “Elephant in the Moon.” He evidently appears to have been dissatisfied with it, by turning it into long verse: from whence, you perceive, he thought the fault lay in the doggerel verse, but that was his forte; the fault lay in the manner of telling…. Butler’s heroics are poor stuff; indeed only doggerel, made languid by heavy expletives. This attempt in the change of his measure was the sillier, not only as he had acquired a mastery in the short measure, but as that measure, somehow or other, suits best with his sort of wit. His characters are full of cold puerilities, though intermixed with abundance of wit, and with a great deal of good sense. He is sometimes wonderfully fine both in his sentiment and expression.

  Butler’s treasures of knowledge appear proportioned to his expence: whatever topick employs his mind, he shews himself qualified to expand and illustrate it with all the accessaries that books can furnish; he is found not only to have travelled the beaten road, but the bye-paths of literature; not only to have taken general surveys, but to have examined particulars with minute inspection.

  Butler, who had as much wit and learning as Cowley, and who knew, what Cowley never knew, how to use them. A great command of good homely English distinguishes him still more from the other writers of the time.

  Butler’s business was the business of desecration, the exact reverse of a poet’s. When Prior attempted afterwards the same line of composition with his peculiar grace and airiness of diction,—when Swift ground society into jests with a rougher turning of the wheel,—still, then and since, has this Butler stood alone. He is the genius of his class; a natural enemy to poetry under the form of a poet: not a great man, but a powerful man.

  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.

  Butler must ever retain his own plot of ground on the English Parnassus: it is a plot however which the other denizens regard as rather an excrescence and perceptibly malodorous, and, in their loftier moods, Apollo and the Muses turn a resolutely blind eye to that particular compartment.

  Taking them in this order, we will commence with a short notice of the miscellaneous verse. (1) We see Butler here, as in all his writings, a disappointed man, whose hand was raised against every man. He had a keen eye for the ridiculous side of things, but he did not care to draw attention to the better side. This may be said of all satirists, but it is a specially marked characteristic of Butler. One would have thought that there was enough folly on all sides of him to occupy his pen, and it is to be regretted that the new-born love for science and antiquity, which distinguished the Restoration era, should have had so persistent an enemy in this man of genius.

  A consummate master of caustic humour.