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to quarrel and make up their minds to part company; Hudibras then makes for the widow's, to swear he has performed his vow in the matter of the whipping, and to ask her hand in reward; Ralpho, however, has his revenge by going there before him, and making the widow acquainted with the true state of the case; whereupon a nocturnal masquerade of furies and hobgoblins is got up by the widow, Ralpho assisting, and Hudibras, after being pinched and cudgelled, is forced by the

and most days of the week, when Mr. | tations. In the first canto we are re-introLongueville or some other crony did not duced to Hudibras and Ralpho just after waylay him, it would be his habit, after his their adventures with the conjuror, as rehodiernal ramble among the old book-lated in the "Second Part." They begin shops and other similar temptations, to return quietly home to his prose and his octosyllabics. Whether Mrs. Butler remained long alive to make his evenings at home more cheery for him; and if so, what thoughts of her old days and their vanished chances passed through her head as, sitting on one side of the fire with her knitting, she saw him silently worming on the other among his books and papers, history does not tell us. And yet the life of every man and woman that once lived and is now dead, was, like our own while it last-ghostly terrors of his situation to confess ed, an infinite series of small sensitive advances through a medium of circumstances; and every day of each such life contained twenty-four complete hours, and every hour of the twenty-four contained sixty minutes, and each minute of every successive sixty had to be gone through individually, and enjoyed or endured to the full. And so, though it is two hundred years, or about eight trillions of pulse-beats since Butler trudged about London, and Mrs. Butler waited for him in Rose Street, that time really was once, and these two elderly persons had their thoughts and their miseries whatever they were.

Regarding Butler's spiritual relations to the various phenomena of the time in which he lived, we have the information of his own writings. And, first of all, it is abundantly clear that he never recanted his aversion to Puritanism, but persevered to the last in his original vocation as the satirist of it and its professors. Besides doing this in short incidental writings, some of which seem to have been published in periodicals and newspapers, he continued to do it on the same scale and in the same systematic form as before by (foolishly enough, we think; for there had been quite enough of it) going on with his Hudibras. After fourteen years of slow quarrying, the "Third Part" of this interminable work was given to the world in 1678, or two years before his death-a second and revised edition of the two preceding parts having been published in 1674. How the "Third Part" was received we do not know, but probably with less noise than its predecessors. As before, the story was the least of the merits of the poem-a mere thread on which to append all sorts of digressions and disser

himself a hypocrite and scoundrel. In canto second, the poet leaves the knight and the squire altogether, and interpolates, totally without any connection with the story, a satire on Puritanism generally in the shape of a historical recapitulation of the whole course of the Civil Wars down to the Restoration, with references by name to Cromwell, Fleetwood, Lentham, Calamy, Case, Henderson, Owen, Nye, Prynne, and others, both Presbyterians and Independents, and with more detailed but covert allusions to the politician Shaftesbury, the quaker Lilburn, &c. Finally, in the third canto, we find the knight, just released from his last scrape by the deceitful Ralpho, taking counsel with a lawyer in order to obtain the widow and her property by inveigling her into a lawsuit ; as preliminary to which he writes her a letter and receives her answer. And so, the story abruptly breaks off; nor, at the same rate of progress, can any one say when it might have been finished.

But though Butler continued to lash the Puritans, both retrospectively by references to the Commonwealth period, and also by singling out subjects of ridicule from among them in their reduced condition as Nonconformists and Sectaries, Puritanism was by no means the sole subject of his satire. Indeed, it had never been so. In the earlier parts of his Hudibras, although satire of Puritanism and the Puritans constituted the direct and main drift of the story and its incessant argumentations and disquisitions, yet, as all who are acquainted with the poem know, there were passages innumerable, glancing off from the main topic at social abuses and bye-topics-at quackery in medicine; at the absurdities of the law and the frauds

of its practitioners; at astrology and false learning; at statecraft and its tricks; at the virtuosi of the Royal Society and their experiments; at love, widows, matrimony, and the foibles of men and women in general. And so, even more conspicuously, in the "Third Part" of the poem, notwithstanding the attempt made in the second canto to hash up the old subject so as to serve it afresh to the cloyed public palate. In short, though Butler was consistent in his old hatred to the end of his life, he found in the new social condition in which his old age was cast, as well as in his own bitter experience of human fickleness and ingratitude, new food for his constitutional habit of censure.

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Nor did Butler confine himself to gendenunciations. He eral and wholesale dissected contemporary society into its Anti-Puritan as he was, and disposed to specific parts and atoms-statesmen, lawloyalty in church and state, as on the yers, poets, physicians, divines, wits, &c., whole the best arrangement a man could and returned apparently the same mermake with his conscience where all was as ciless verdict on each part that he did on bad as it could be, the state of public the whole. The most interesting and commorals and manners which the Restora- plete of all his prose writings, for example tion had brought with it, found no apolo--that which, under the name of "Chargist in Butler. A man advanced in life, bred up too in honest English ways, and with a natural austerity of disposition which had probably always saved him from even the more venial forms of vice, he seems to have looked about him at the on-goings of the restored court, and the public men of his latter days, with no other feelings than those of contempt and disgust. There are evidences of this in the last part of his great poem, where he almost shows an intention of falling foul of the existing powers and scourging them as he had scourged the opposite side; but the most express evidence of the fact is to be found in those scraps of prose and verse which he left behind him jottings, so to speak, in his commonplace-book-to be published when he was no more. Here are two illustrations-the first from the collection of his "Prose Thoughts upon various Subjects," printed in Thyer's Remains; the second from a short poetical piece there published under the title of "A Satire on the Licentiousness of the Age of Charles II."

"Princes that have lost their credit and reputation are like merchants inevitably destined to ruin; for all men immediately call in their loyalty and respect from the first, as they do their money from the latter."

"Tis a strange age we've lived in and a lewd As e'er the son in all his travels view'd.

*

acters," fills the whole of the second volume of Thyer's "Remains," and which must evidently, from the care with which every page is written, have occupied much of Butler's time after the first two parts of Hudibras were off his hands, and have been destined by him for independent publication-consists of nothing else than a series of sketches, written with an unvarying acerbity and harshness hardly paralleled in our literature, of what Butler must have considered the typical forms and phases of English human nature in his time. We do not know how we can better give an idea of Butler's real character and temper than by copying out this little-known list of characters"Butler's analysis, as it may be called, of contemporary English society, so far as he was acquainted with it, into its constituent particles.

1. A modern politician. 16. A small poet.
2. An hypocritical non- 17. A philosopher.
conformist.
18. A fantastic.

3. A republican.

4. A politician.
5. A state convert.
6. A risker.

7. A modern statesman.
8. A Duke of Bucks.
9. A degenerate noble.
10. A huffing courtier.
11. A court beggar.
12. A country squire.
13. An antiquary.
14. A proud man.
15. The hen-pecked man.

19. A melancholy man.
20. An haranguer.
21. A Popish priest.
22. A traveller.
23. A Catholic.
24. A curious man.
25. A ranter.
26. A corrupt judge.
27. An amorist.
28. An astrologer.
29. A lawyer.
30. An herald.
31. A Latitudinarian.

32. A mathematician.
33. An epigrammatist.
34. A virtuoso.

35. A justice of peace.
36. A fanatic.
37. An intelligencer,
(newsman.)

38. À proselyte.
39. A clown.
40. A quibbler.
41. A wooer.

42. An impudent man.
43. An imitator.

44. A time-server.

45. A prater.

77. An affected man.
78. A medicine-taker.
79. The rude man.
80. A miser.

81. A rabble.
82. A shopkeeper.
83. A quaker.
84. A swearer.

85. A luxurious man.
86. An ungrateful man.
87. A Knight of the Post,
(hired perjurer.)
88. An undeserving fa-

89.

46. An hermetic philoso- 90.

pher.

47. An alderman.

48. A disputant.

49. A sot.

50. An Atheist.

51. A juggler.
52. A sceptic.
53. A projector.
54. A complimenter.
55. A church-warden.
56. A romance-writer.
57. A cheat.

58. A libeller.

59. A tedious man.
60. A tailor.

61. A factious member.
62. A pretender.
63. A newsmonger.
64. An ambassador.
65. A play-writer.
66. A mountebank.
67. A modern critic.
68. A wittal.
69. A busy man.
70. A litigious man.
71. A pedant.

72. A hunter.

73. A humorist.

vorite.
A cuckold.

A malicious man.
91. A squire of dames.
92. A knave.

93. An anabaptist.
94. A vintner.

95. An hypocrite.
96. An opiniaster.

97. A choleric man.
98. A lover.

99. A translator.
100. A rebel.

101. A city wit.

103. A drole.

104. An empiric.

good many of them are taken from the opposite side of society and politics altogether; some are taken from the literary department, and some from the scientific department of English life in that day; and many are altogether general, and have reference to lasting forms of human weakness, imposture, crime, and folly.

It was in the nature of Butler's satire, that, finding all to be equally censurable, it should express itself rather in representative portraits of classes, than in personalities. Occasionally, however, as in the character entiled "A Duke of Bucks," and in incidental allusions to Prynne and other sectaries, whom Butler seems to have particularly disliked, this rule is broken through; and in some of his posthumous scraps of verse, there is evidence that his satire could, when he liked, single out individual victims. Thus, among the scraps, we find a violent personal lampoon on 102. A superstitious man. Denham; a squib on Philip Nye's beard; two mock panegyrics on Dryden's brotherin-law, the Honorable Edward Howard, on the occasion of a heroic drama which he had written, and which Butler, and most other critics, thought to be bad stuff; and finally, which was boldest of all, a parody of Dryden's own dramatic diction, in the form of a dialogue between two cats caterwauling in heroics. In fact, with the whole literary world of the time, as with the whole social world, Butler seems to have been in his heart at fued. Writers, critics, readers-all were bad; and so far as he thought it necessary to express his opinion of them, it was always in censure. Above all (and the fact must out) the Royal Society and the Virtuosi came in for an unsual share of Butler's ridicule. One or two of them, such as Boyle and Dr. Charlton, he attacks by name; and among his posthumous poems and papers there are three or four expressly satirizing the Society's weekly meetings and their mathematical and physical pursuits.

105. An obstinate man.
106. A zealot.
107. An overdoer.
108. A jealous man.
109. An insolent man.
110. A rash man.
111. A pimp.
112. A formal man.
113. A flatterer.
114. A prodigal.
115. A pettifogger.
116. A bankrupt.
117. The inconstant.
118. A horse-courser.

74. A leader of a faction.119. A glutton.
75. A debauched man. 120. A ribald.
76. A seditious man.

The fact that each and all of the characters in the above list are unsparing invectives, without one qualifying word in praise of any living thing or person, may arise in part from the circumstance, that Butler's literary forte was satire, and that he deliberately restricted himself, in writing them, to the mean and ugly side of things. But whoever reads the characters will see in their uniform and inexhaustible bitterness something more than this-a positive dissatisfaction of Butler's own mind with all that he saw, and a habit of finding nothing in the world that was not, if well looked into, evil and intolerable. Were the "characters" classified, it would be found that only a certain proportion of them are taken from the Puritan or Nonconformist side of things. A

"These were their learned speculations,
And all their constant occupations:
To measure wind and weigh the air,
And turn a circle to a square;
To make a powder of the sun,
By which all doctors should b' undone;
To find the north-west passage out,
Although the farthest way about;
If chymists from a rose's ashes
Can raise the rose itself in glasses;
Whether the line of incidence
Rise from the object or the sense;

To strew the "Elixir" in a bath
Of hope, credulity, and faith;
To explicate, by double hints,
The grain of diamonds and flints;
And in the braying of an ass
Find out the treble and the bass;
If mares neigh alto, and a cow
A double diapason low."

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out, and only Mr. Longueville's charity stood between him and absolute destitution, the poet, some time in 1680, caught a fever, or a consumption, which carried him off on the 25th of September, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. Mr. Longueville, to whom Butler had bequeathed his papers, acted as his executor. He made Men are often modest and amiable in exertions to get up a subscription for burytheir personal demeanor who are fierce ing his deceased friend in Westminster and aggressive in their writings; but with Abbey; but though the news of Butler's all allowance on this score, it is too evi- death in such melancholy circumstances dent that a man who could not let even seems to have caused a good deal of talk the venerable Royal Society alone, must in town, and became the subject of strong have had a crabbed and ill-conditioned comment afterwards by Dryden, Oldham, element in him, not likely to further his and others, the interest felt at the_mointerests in life. Probably the consciousness ment was not sufficient to carry Mr. Lonof this, developed at last into the habitual gueville's project. Accordingly, the poet's sourness of a disappointed man, was the remains were interred, at Mr. Longuesecret of Butler's solitary way of living. ville's own expense, in the churchyard of He was emphatically, as Dr. Johnson St. Paul's, Covent Garden. He seems to would have said, not a clubbable" man. have wished to be buried there. He "It is both the wisest and safest way," is was buried, says Aubrey, the 27th of Sepone of the maxims found in his common- tember, "according to his own appointplace-book, "to keep at a convenient dis- ment, in the churchyard of Covent Gartance from all men; for when men con- den, in the north part, next the church, verse too closely, they commonly, like at the east end. His feet touch the wall. those that meet in crowds, offend one His grave two yards distant from the another." Poor man, he seems at last to pilaster of the dore, by his desire six foot overtasked his own maxim, and to have deepe. About twenty-five of his old ackept at an inconvenient distance from all quaintance at his funeral, I myself being men. There is good evidence that in his one." It is worth while, reader, should last days he was literally in want. If he you ever be passing through Covent Garhad made any money by his Hudibras, it den, to stand by the railing of the now was too little to stand him in stead of somewhat dingy churchyard, on the west everything else; and he was too slow and side, a little away from where the market shiftless, and perhaps too proud, a writer gardeners chaffer among their baskets and to make much of such opportunities as cabbage leaves, and to indentify, by Auwriting for periodicals and the like then brey's description, the spot where the auafforded. He appears, in his necessity, to thor of Hudibras is buried. It was, one have thought of making a desperate at- may say, the centre of his domain of extempt at a drama, then the species of lite-ercise and observation while he was alive. rature which brought the best returns; and part of a tragedy, entitled "Nero," was found among his papers. But his true resource was Mr. Longueville. "Mr. Longueville," says Roger North, in his Life of Lord Guildford, "was the last patron and friend that poor old Butler, the author of Hudibras, had, and, in his old age, he supported him, otherwise he might have been literally starved." What was the exact measure of Mr. Longueville's kindness is unknown-one always fancies that wealthy lairds and lawyers might do so very much with their purses in such At all events, after a hard winter passed in his lodging in Rose Street, during which he was so ill that he never went

cases.

It is very near Rose Street, and round it lie the Strand, Fleet Street, Gerard Street, Drury Lane, and all the other classic old streets in which the literary men of that time (the Shaksperes and Jonsons of a former age had kept more to the south and east) had their haunts and dwellings, and which still, in later generations, though the tendency continued to be north and westward, served for the Addisons, and Johnsons, and Goldsmiths, to live and walk in. Ah, London! thou perpetual home of a shifting multitude, how, as into a vast sieve, the generations keep descending amid thy brick-built streets and and alleys, only to trickle away and disappear beneath into thy catacombs and

cemeteries. A while thou holdest us; but the reservoir is filling over us with the perpetual rain, and we, too, are sinking, sinking, towards the ancient dead!

Butler, says Aubrey, was "of middle stature, strong sett, high-colored, with a head of sorrel hair, a severe and sound judgment; a good fellow." Again, from another source, "he was of a leoninecolored hair, sanguine, choleric, middlesized, strong; a boon and witty companion, especially among the company he knew well." As regards his good fellowship, we have already seen, on other evidence, how far that is to be understood; one is glad, however, to know, by way of curiosity, that his complexion and hair were so nearly of Cromwell's own color. The form of his face in the portraits is heavy and sullen.

very

Our impression of Butler's general character as a man-on which his character as a writer may be regarded as a superstructure-has, we trust, already been conveyed. He seems to have been a man of grave, correct, and somewhat morose nature, decidedly of that order of mind which, by way of philosophic distinction, may be called the descendental; a man, the basis of whose intellectual being was strong, solid, but very hard and earthly sense. One might compare him with Swift, who, however, had a more savage and demoniac element in him, which led him farther, and brought him in contact at least with the infernal side of that which transcends the visible. On the whole, one can best realize Butler's exact character, by regarding him as, more peculiarly than any other man of his age, the polar opposite to Milton-Milton the transcendental man of his time, and the noblest literary representative and defender of that class of sentiments and opionions which Butler derided. This contrast, or polarity in the intellectual world, is discernible in all ages, though it is not always instanced in so remarkable a manner. There are always men who can "stand no nonsense," who take their footing on what they call the hard fact of things, who have an innate turn for undervaluing whatever is high, extreme, and unusual, either in thought or action-high metaphysics, high art, high poetry, high Calvinism, high anything. On the other hand, there are always men who, from some constitutional peculiarity, call it ideality, heart, enthusiasm, artistic sense, tendency to the

metaphysical, or what you will-revel in the high, feel at home in it, and prefer it. It is from the first class more particularly that satirists are born; except when, as sometimes happens, a man of the other class steps out, clothed in the very thunders of his high contemplations, to satirize the satirists themselves, and prove to them the celestial, if only by its thunder. Milton himself was a satirist, when he chose, in this sense; Butler was a satirist in the other. His philosophy of human nature was that of the lowest schools; and there is no maxim that he repeats more frequently, and with a more bitter emphasis, both in verse and in prose, than that interest alone governs the world, and that those who proceed on any other supposition are fools. Thus:

"All the business of the world is but diversion, and all the happiness in it that mankind is capa ble of, anything that will keep it from reflecting whoever can by any trick keep himself from thinkupon the misery, vanity, and nonsense of it, and ing of it, is as wise and happy as the best man in it." "The chiefest art of government is to convert the ignorance, folly, and madness of mankind, as much as may be to their own good; which can never be done by telling them truth and reason, or using any direct means, but by little tricks and devices (as they cure madmen) that work upon their hopes and fears, to which their ignorance naturally inclines them." .-Thoughts on various subjects.

These are precisely the cardinal notions of the sceptical or descendental philosophy; and the constitutional tenacity with which Butler held to them, explains his whole career and character. How could such a man be other than an antagonist of Puritanism, the very essence of which consisted in a belief in the possibility of an actual reign of God, through His saints, on earth? "What are all histories and records of actions in former times," said Cromwell, "but a revelation of God that He hath destroyed, and tumbled down, and trampled under foot whatever He hath not planted?" Compare this magnificent definition of history from the Puritan point of view with Butler's comic one, from his, and say whether it was possible for the two men not to oppose each other:

"What else does history use to tell us,

But tales of subjects being rebell'ous ?"

But that same disbelief of Butler in all that was high or divine in human nature

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