"When civil dudgeon first grew high, work in earnest in preparing it. He had sitting. And, certainly, if one did take it certainly every incentive to be busy; for up, there was little chance of his laying it much as was already going in the shape of down again without doing it justice. Fancy satire and ridicule of the parties cast down the first reader opening the book, and lightfrom power, and of general fun and scurril-ing at once on such a beginning as this: ity in literature, by way of outburst of humor that had been repressed during the Commonwealth, and of welcome to a witty monarch and his courtiers just come over from the Continent with French mistresses and French manners to inaugurate a new era, Butler could not but foresee that such a poem as he was preparing would cut in through it all, and win a place for itself in the midst of the duller poems and plays with which the old Royalists, Davenant, Denham, and Waller, and the new aspirants, Dryden, Sedley, Roscommon, and Co., were bidding for the ear of the town. One interruption there was, however, which he may have This was certainly a promising set out, and permitted himself with satisfaction-that would tempt the reader to go on. caused by his marriage, which took place he did so, he was not likely to be disappointabout this time, with a Mrs. Herbert, a lady ed. The description of Sir Hudibras and of some property. Butler, it would appear, was late in love as well as in poetry; but for this very reason there may have been less delay with his Hudibras. It was not at Sir Samuel Luke's, however, nor in Bedfordshire, that the work was finally written out, but in a new situation to which Butler, possibly on account of his known loyalty, was promoted after the Restoration that of Secretary to the Earl of Carbery, Lord President of the Principality of Wales. It has been ascertained that he held this situation, and also, in association with it, as the Earl's gift, the Stewardship of Ludlow Castle, at least as early as January 1661, and that he retained the Stewardship till January 1662. In that month, the Earl's accounts speak of him as having vacated the office of Steward, and having been succeeded by another person. The probability therefore is, that some time in 1662 he came to reside in London, with the purpose of secing his Hudibras through the press. The imprimatur of the "First Part" of the work, licensing its publication, is dated the 11th of November 1662; and though the date 1663 is on the title-page, copies were really out before Christmas 1662. We have seen a copy of the original edition of this "First Part" of Hudibras. It is a thin little volume, decently printed, without the author's name, and with an intimation on the title-page that the poem was "written during the late wars." It was exactly such a volume as the readers of that day would be likely to take up in virtue of its mere appearance-small enough to be held between the finger and thumb as one walked in the streets, or lounged at home in the evening, and to be read through at one Was beat with fist, instead of a stick; And if his qualifications, now known to every schoolboy, would then come upon the reader with all the freshness of its native oddity; and he must have been a grave man indeed if his gravity did not give way when he came to such rhymes as "Besides, 'tis known he could speak Greek That Latin was no more difficile The famous passage about Sir Hudibras' rhetoric, occurring in the third or fourth page, would be read twice or thrice on the spot, before going farther: "For rhetoric, he could not ope His mouth, but out there flew a trope; Teach nothing but to name his tools. &c. But the clenching passage would, of course, be that describing the knight's religion: "For his religion, it was fit To match his learning and his wit; And prove their doctrine orthodox Call fire, and sword, and desolation, In them, in other men all sin. That which they love most tenderly; And blaspheme custard through the nose." rabble under Trulla's generalship, the fortune of the war is reversed, Crowdero is rescued, and Hudibras and Ralpho, after a plenteous thumping, are themselves put in the stocks and left to discuss the comparative merits of Presbytery and Independency at their leisure. To all this burlesque tissue of incident, coarse enough in parts to please a not very squeamish taste, the more intelligent readers of the poem would be comparatively indifferent; nor would it have enhanced the interest in this respect much if they had troubled themselves, as foolish commentators on the poem afterwards did, with identifying the characters with noted sectaries of the day, whom Butler never thought of or saw. It was enough that, in the course of the narration, the Puritans of all sects were burlesqued as they had never been before, and their habits of talking held up to ridicule, and that passages of odd wit and learning occurred in every page, all hitting at some laughable topic of the day, and capable of being remembered and quoted. It was probably a circumstance in favor of the full recognition of these merits in the book that the "First Part" was published by itself, so as not to overdose the reader. The success of the book was certainly This passage alone would settle the fate instantaneous. Not a new poem of Tennyof the book with every Courtier or Royalist son's, not a new Christmas story by Dickens, that might chance to take it up. What has now-a-days a greater run through the mattered it that in going on he found very town, than, allowing for the difference of little plot or action in the book-nothing times, the first part of Hudibras had during but a rough rigmarole story miserably the Christmas-week of 1662-3. The king travestied from Don Quixote, and spun out himself had got hold of it, and was carrying through three cantos, of how the Presby- it about with him, and quoting it; the terian knight, and his Independent squire courtiers got the passages he quoted by heart; Ralpho, sally forth, each accoutred after his and in all the coffee and chocolate-houses the fashion, in search of adventures; how they wits discussed its merits. Mr. Pepys, who come to a place where there is to be a bear- was never the last to hear of a new thing, baiting, and where a great rabble is already lets us know the exact day on which he first assembled to witness or take part in the heard of the poem, and what he thought of sport, including the bear Bruin himself. it. "To the wardrobe" is the entry he Orsin, the bear's master, the wooden-legged makes in his Diary on the 26th of December fiddler Crowdero, the warlike butcher and 1662, the day after Christmas, "and hither dog-owner Talgol, the tinker Magnano, and come Mr. Battersby; and we falling into his female companion Trulla, the one-eyed discourse of a new book of drollery in use cobbler Cerdon, the hostler and cattle-keeper called Hudibras, I would needs go find it out, Colon, and, besides these leaders, men and and met with it at the Temple: cost me 2s. mastiffs innumerable from all the parishes 6d. But when I come to read it, it is so round; how it entered the knight's head silly an abuse of the Presbyter knight going that he ought to put down this bear-baiting to the warrs, that I am ashamed of it; and as a heathenish practice, and how he and by and by meeting at Mr. Townsend's at the more reluctant Ralpho debated the point; how at last the knight, ending the debate, spurs on his wall-eyed beast to the encounter, and how, after a fierce tussle, in which both knight and squire get unmercifully belabored, they succeed in routing the rabble and capturing the fiddler, whom they carry off in triumph and put in the stocks; but how, in the end, by the rallying of the dinner, I sold it him for 18d.,” — after which, he tells us, he went to the theatre, and coming home rather late found his wife busy among her pies." Evidently, however, Pepys, from his allusion to "the Presbyter knight going to the warrs," had not read enough of the book even to know its subject; and finding himself in the minority in his opinion of it, and its' fame on the town growing instead of abating, he thought it prudent to renew his acquaintance with it. To Lincolns' Inn Fields," he writes on the 6th of February following, "and it being too soon to go home to dinner, I walked up and down, and looked upon the outside of the new theatre building in Covent Garden, which will be very fine; and so to a bookseller's in the Strand, and there bought Hudibras again, it being certainly some ill humor to be so against that which all the world cries up to be an example of wit; for which I am resolved once more to read him and see whether I can find it or no." It is no argument against the book that Pepys, even on a second trial, could not relish it much; and, at all events, the town differed from him, for such a demand was there for copies that within a fortnight after its first appearance, the publisher had to warn his customers by advertisement against a pirated edition. There seems no reason to doubt that, though the poem was published anonymously, Butler at once acknowledged himself as the author. The King, it is said, in his first fit of delight with the book, proposed sending for him; and it was natural, as Johnson says, that every eye should watch for the golden shower which was to fall upon the author of a performance so exactly to the tune of the reigning taste. Butler, however, was no Danae, but a somewhat unsocial man of fifty, with few friends in town; and the golden shower did not fall through his garret. That he himself shared in the general expectation that something would be done for him, is very likely; but he does not seem to have overrated the chance. As only the author of a poem which, though a valuable service to the Royalist cause, was in some respects merely a posthumous service, rendered when the danger was past and the victory accomplished, he probably saw that there were other claimants closer to the Royal Exchequer than he could expect to be. Sensibly enough, therefore, he seems to have made up his mind to bide his time, and meanwhile to labor patiently at the "Second Part" of his poem, so as to get it out before the enthusiasm for the first part had subsided. Already, in fact, besides pirated editions of that "First Part," the town was full of pretended continuations and imitations, in which the story was carried on, and the style and metre of the first part copied as closely as possible. It was late in 1663, or almost exactly a year after the publication of the first part, that the true "Second Part" made its appearance, and threw all the spurious imitations into the shade. The date on the title-page is 1664; but the imprimatur is dated November 5, 1663, and the pertina cious Pepys, after borrowing a copy in the end of November, in order to avoid buying it till he found out whether he liked it better than the first, ended by going to his bookseller's at St. Paul's Churchyard on the 10th of December, and giving an order for both parts together. Having had a windfall that day of about £3, he had gone to invest it in books; and Hudibras being then still, he says, "the book in greatest fashion for drollery," he had made it one. 66 The merits of the "Second Part" of Hudibras were the same as those of the Firs, and the reception was very much the same. Some there were who might take interest in the mere continued story of the adventures of the Knight and the Squire - how they were released from the stocks by the intervention of a widow whom the Knight has been courting for her money, and who, in releasing him, holds out hopes to him, on condition of his giving himself a flagellation, which he swears to do; how he put it off till next day, and then, in riding to the appointed spot, begins to reason with Ralpho whether such an oath is binding on a saint; how Ralpho, as his contribution to this problem in casuistry, suggests that some one else should take the whipping in the Knight's stead, and the knight, catching at the idea, proposes that Ralpho himself shall be the man; how Ralpho instantly backs out, and there ensues an angry altercation between the two, which has almost come to blows, when it is interrupted by the opportune appearance of a Skimmington Procession," that is, of a village rabble punishing a scold by carrying her about astride on horseback, with her husband beside her, to the music of pots and pans and cleavers ; how the knight attacks this as another heathenish show, and he and Ralpho are discomfitted with rotten eggs; how, recovering from this disaster, the knight proposes to go to the widow and swear that he has duly performed the promised flagellation, but thinks it worth while, on the way, to go and consult the Rosicrucian astrologer Sidrophel, as to the probable success of his suit; and how this consultation, beginning in a learned discussion between Hudibras and Sidrophel, on the occult sciences, ends also in a fight in which Hudibras, Sidrophel, Ralpho, and Sidrophel's man, Whachum, all take part, and in which the conjurer has the worst of it. On the whole, however, as before, it would be the wit of the poem, its quaint sense and learning, its passages of sarcastic reflection on all manner of topics, and, above all, its unsparing ridicule of men and things on the Puritan side, rather than any merits it might possess of description and narration, that would recommend it in higher critical quar ters. The Second Part is, indeed, even more is known, for example, that Butler continued readable than the First. to write and to satirize his contemporaries in occasional contributions to periodicals; that the third and last part of Hudibras was published in 1678, fourteen years after the second; that for some time before his death, he resided in Rose Street, Longacre; and that at this time he had a few acquaintances in town, who saw him now and then, and were kind to him. But whether even he resided during the whole of the last seventeen years of his life in London, or whether during part of the time he went back to the country, or lived on the Continent, is only matter of conjecture. On the whole, our impression is, that he remained all the time, casual absences excepted, in London-recognized there, so far as he was recognized at all, as one of the wits of the day, regularly indentured by his fate to literature and the town; and starting with this impression, and taking Rose Street, Longacre, as his probable whereabouts in the metropolis, during the whole period in question, we shall piece together the remainder of the story as we best can. It was high time now that the "golden shower" should descend, if it was to descend at all; and the truth seems to be, that by this time Butler was sorely in need of it. He may have had a little money of his own, saved out of the earnings of his previous employments; and his wife had brought him some fortune, upon which he had calculated at the time of their marriage, as a means of their joint support. But this last, his main dependence, had, his biographers inform us, been invested in "bad securities;" so that, after a while, little or nothing was to be derived from it. A post or a pension, such as, according to the lax fashion of those times. might very well have been bestowed on the greatest anti-puritan satirist of the day without risk of public outcry, would, in these circumstances, have been extremely welcome. As it was, however, in a court swarming with Buckinghams, Lady Castlemaines, and the like, any kindly intentions that may have been entertained in behalf of a poor wit about town, soon died out and were forgotten. There is a vague story of a temporary dona- Dreadful seventeen years those were. tion of £300 to Butler, out of the king's own Satirist of the Puritans as Butler was, he purse, which Butler instantly expended in must have sometimes questioned with himpaying his debts; and a still more vague self whether after all the system which had story of a subsequent annual pension of £100. come, instead of that which he had satirized, Neither story is authenticated; at all events, was not, in essential particulars, many times the latter is false; and the literal truth worse. He had made himself a prophet of seems to be, that from the first appearance the "descendental," and here was "descenof Hudibras till the poet's death in 1680, he dentalism" with a vengeance! Positively, never received a single farthing from the as we have seen it expressed, the age of the court, or anything more substantial than Restoration in England was an age when it empty praise. It was Butler's strange fate seemed as if, by one of those vicissitudes to flash all at once into a notoriety which which affect the organisms of nations as well lasted precisely two years; to fill the court as of individuals, the universal cranium of and the town during that time with a con- England, without changing its actual bulk, tinuous shout of laughter, intermingled with inquiries who and what he was; and then for seventeen long years to plod on in industrious obscurity, still hearing his Hudibras quoted, and still preparing more of it, or of matter similar to it, but himself forgotten and unknown -a myth" rather than a man. had been suddenly contracted in every other direction, so as to permit an inordinate increase of that region which lies over the nape of the neck. The profligacy of the times was ostentatious; the public reaction against the enforced moralities and decencies of the Commonwealth, immediate and immeasurable. It was not, perhaps, that the It is as a myth rather than a man, we relative proportions of virtue and vice have said—as a typical instance of talent actually existing in English society were poor, unrewarded, and miserable in its old altered, for probably these proportions are age, rather than as an actual being of flesh more constant under all changes of system and blood that the biographer of Butler than may at first seem; but it was as in a is able to follow him during those seventeen state revolution or change of ministryyears of his life which elapsed between the Virtue went out of office and Vice came in. publication of the "Second Part" of his Puritanism, and whatever appertained to it, great poem and his death and burial in had been cast down from the upper places London. One or two facts, indeed, apper- of society, and driven back into conventicles taining to the actual man, break through and lurking-places and the private housethe monotonous obscurity of these long years, holds of obscure citizens, there, in token of and give individuality and substance to what its dissociation from power, to assume the otherwise would be a legend altogether. It name of Non-conformity; and the new generation of courtiers and cavaliers, who was still talked of. Baxter, also, and other had come in with the Restoration to possess divines more or less connected with the themselves of the vacant government, were Puritans heretofore, were now among the far worse men than their fathers of the reign lights of the Nonconformists. of Charles I. All these men, however, were rather in the age than of it; and in speaking of the literature of the Restoration it is invariably a different order of men that we have in view-those Royalist writers who, either reappearing from their various haunts and places of exile at the time of the king's restoration, or then first emerging into notice, formed the cluster of the so-called wits of the reign of Charles II. Nor was it only in the court and in matters of politics and government that the sudden change occasioned by the Restoration was apparent. The new literature which then came in was a fair reflex of the new condition of society. There were, indeed, exceptions. Just as the genuine Puritans had not ceased to exist in England, but had only vacated the topmost places, and been dispersed through the body-politic under the The laureate of this new literature, and, name of Nonconformists, so there remained er officio, therefore, its head and representain English society, even in this age of des- tive man, during the first eight years after cendentalism, a few intellectual men of the the Restoration, was Sir William Davenant. old transcendental stamp. Jeremy Taylor Except that he had no nose, and could not survived the Restoration seven years; old with propriety account for the loss of it, he Izaak Walton and Sir Thomas Browne lived was by no means a bad fellow. Milton liked through the whole reign of Charles II. It him, and had been obliged to him for one of was chiefly, however, among men more or those offices of kindness which an influential less connected with the Puritans during the man of letters on the winning side was able period of their ascendency that these saving to perform for a political adversary whom he men, the salt of a corrupt time, were to be esteemed and admired; and his poetry, if found. Conspicuous among them all was not immortal, was also not immoral, and at Milton. An official servant of the late least better than much that was going. But Commonwealth, and more nearly identified Davenant was rather a poet of the old school with the Regicides by his writings than any of Charles I.; he had succeeded Ben Jonson other Englishman of the intellectual class, in the laureatship in 1637, and only resumed he had with some difficulty escaped the pains his place at the Restoration in virtue of his and penalties which the Restoration brought proved loyalty and his prior tenure of it, with it for the active heads of his party; and when he was already verging on sixty. He now, blind and desolate, a spiritual relic of was still, it is true, active enough, and took the past rather than an actual part of the a great interest in the revival of the drama, present, he was spending the decline of his himself writing plays for the stage; but, on days in some obscure retreat in London, full the whole, the conduct of the new literature of his own lofty thoughts, and building up devolved upon men who were his juniors. slowly the scheme of his majestic epic. With Nor, though Shirley, Waller, Denham, Cowwhat scorn he must have looked around him, ley, and other Royalists of distinction in and how often, before his own death in 1674, literature, were still alive to lend the lustre must he have remembered the lion-counte of their names to the opening reign of the Bance of that "Cromwell, our chief of restored monarch, were they exactly the men," whom it was now the fashion to turn representative men. Shirley lived but a few into jest, and whom, in their impotent rage, years to enjoy the pleasure of once more his enemies had torn from his grave and treading the familiar boards and seeing his hanged and re-buried at Tyburn. Never far own plays acted; he died in 1666 at the age from Milton, and always most serious when of seventy. Waller was a wealthy gentlehe was nearest him, was Andrew Marvell. man, advanced in life; and though he lived This, too, was the age of Bunyan, whom long after the Restoration, and continued to Butler might have known and quizzed before give evidences both of his poetical talents and the Restoration, when he was a Baptist wit, and of the moral cowardice which had preacher at Bedford, within a mile or two distinguished his previous career, he never of Sir Samuel Luke's, and who was now, not lost a certain dignity of deportment unlike Milton, embodying, in prison and even among the young scapegraces with under persecution, that enthusiasm of a whom he associated. Denham had a coarser bygone time which still dwelt in his soul, in fibre in him and was a younger man; but immortal written allegories. A remnant in the few years he lived after the Restoration another sense of the intellectual world of were clouded with insanity or the dread of the Commonwealth was James Harrington, it. The good and melancholy Cowley, too, the Republican theorist, whose "Oceana," was more properly a man of the previous age though published during the Protectorate, than of this. Though only in the prime of |