manhood, he survived the Restoration but termined to throw his powers into what was seven years, during which he wrote little, in fashion. It was not till the lighter and but lived in seclusion, neglected by the court more vivacious wits-the Buckinghams, he had served, and yet, bis metaphysical Ethereges, Sedleys, and Wycherlys-had style being in the ascendant, admired beyond given the town a sample of something gayer bounds by all the best minds in England. and more sprightly in the way of humorous Of other men of the graver sort, surviving profligacy than his lumbering prose comefrom among the royalists of the reign of the dies, that he began to give up that species of first Charles and the Interregnum, so as to effort, and to confine himself to those heroic witness and become subjects of the Restora- rhymed plays of bombastic declamation after tion-Hobbes, Cudworth, Barrow, and the the French model, in which he remained the like it is unnecessary to speak; the most acknowledged master. And so, during the ordinary knowledge of them and their writ- first eight years of the Restoration, it was ings will save them from being confounded this cluster of younger wits, with the solid with the proper representatives of the new Dryden in the centre, and the lighter Etherera. These representatives, as all know, were eges and Sedleys skirmishing around him, such younger men as Dryden, and his con- that represented the spirit of the new reign. temporaries, Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Accordingly, when Davenant died in 1668, Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, Sir George it was Dryden that was chosen as his natural Etherege, Lord Buckhurst, afterwards Earl successor in the laureateship. From that of Dorset, Sir Charles Sedley, William Wy- time forward Dryden was nominally, as well cherly, and Thomas Shadwell. It was these as really, the head of the literature of the men, with Dryden, the most masculine and Restoration. Himself still continuing to be robust of them all, acting as the leader, that, known chiefly as a dramatist and critic of mingling with the Davenants and Shirleys the drama, and most of all as a writer of and Wallers and Denhams and Cowleys, who rhymed heroic plays, and the Ethereges and belonged in part to the past, and learning Sedleys and Wycherlys still fluttering round of them for a while as pupils, began, in the him and snatching at his laurels, he in turn first years of the Restoration, to cater, ac- became a patriarch, and saw new authors cording to methods of their own, for the springing up around him, and adding thempublic taste. Dryden was twenty-eight years selves to the cluster. Of these the wretched old at the Restoration, and was just then be- Rochester was one. He was but twenty-two ginning to be heard of; the Duke of Bucking-years of age when Dryden became laureate, ham, the prince of profligates and court-wits, but had already filled the town with the was five years older; the Earl of Roscommon fame of his wit and his debaucheries. The was a year or two younger; Sir George unhappy Otway in time became another, and Etherege was in his twenty-fifth year; Dor-rivalled Dryden in the tragic drama. And set was twenty-three; Sir Charles Sedley besides Rochester and Otway were many mitwenty-two; and Wycherly and Shadwell nor men, now all but forgotten. It was not were both exactly twenty. Their age, there- till towards the close of Charles' reign that fore, fitted them to become the rising powers in the new literature; and their tastes and faculties corresponded. They, with others not worth naming, flung themselves at once upon the town, and began to provide it with such gross entertainment as it craved. Roscommon alone was purer in his writings than in his life: "Unhappy Dryden in all Charles' days Roscommon only boasts unspotted lays." Such is Pope's celebrated distich, at once absolving Roscommon and condemning Dryden and all the rest by contrast. And it is notorious that Dryden, perhaps personally the most moral man of them all, was, in the beginning of his career, the most deliberately and unnaturally coarse as a writer. He absolutely toiled and labored against the grain of his genius, to be sufficiently obscene to please the town. The reason was that the comic drama was then the form of literature in the greatest fashion, and that he had de Dryden, pressed as it were by the competition of these junior wits, carried his great powers beyond the drama altogether, and, betaking himself in his comparatively old age to other forms of literature, acquired in them the better part of what now constitutes his true fame. Into this latter part of his life, however, seeing that Butler was dead before it began, it is not necessary that we should trace him. So far as the characteristic literature, therefore, of the age of the Restoration was concerned, it was a genuine reflex of the prevalent social morality. It was truly a literature of the Occiput a literature in the production of which, to talk phrenologically, the back of the head was more exercised than any of the coronal or anterior organs, except perhaps wit. There was no lack of energy on it, but it was mainly occipital energy, and there was a manifest deficiency of those higher qualities which had balanced the occipital, even when there was enough and to spare of that, in the older literature of Eng- did the First and Second Parts of Hudibras land. Curiously enough, however, contem- fall; and in the midst of such a medley of poraneous with this inordinate and reaction- persons, things, and interests, so far as it ary development of what may be called the was represented in the metropolis, did the literature of the occiput in England, were author of Hudibras, after his first temporary the beginnings of an intellectual movement flash of success, trudge out and in on his of another kind far more beautiful, and yet, daily peregrinations from his domicile in or as it would appear, mysteriously cognate. about Rose Street, Longacre. His personal We do not know what organs the phrenolo- relations with men of the time, we have algists would specify as being chiefly concerned ready said,- or at least with men of the in the prosecution of physical science, but time who, from their station, could be of supposing them to be number, individuality, any use to him,-seem to have been few. eventuality, and causality, then we must Here are two passages which give us all the conclude that, in addition to wit, these or- knowledge of him in this respect that we gans suffered no depression in that general ever are likely to have: contraction backwards which the cranium of Butler's Introduction to Lord Dorset.our nation certainly underwent at the Restoration, but rather became more vivacious in "His Lordship, having a great desire to spend their action, as being no more bothered by author of Hudibras, prevailed with Mr. Fleetan evening as a private gentleman with the any accompanying excess of ideality, won-wood Shepherd to introduce him into his comder, and veneration. Be this as it may, it pany at a tavern which they used, in the charis certain that mathematical and physical re-acter only of a common friend. This being search- the application of Bacon's hitherto done, Mr. Butler, while the first bottle was dormant method to the facts and appearances of nature-came in with the reign of the witty monarch. It was in 1660 that Dr. Ward, Mr. Boyle, my Lord Brouncker, Dr. Wilkins, Dr. Wallis, Sir William Petty, and others, founded the Royal Society, and began those readings of mathematical papers, and experiments with tubs of water, phials of quicksilver, lenses, telescopes, &c., which procured for them the name of virtuosi, and at which the town laughed. In due time other men of distinction added themselves to this illustrious little band, — Wren, Barrow, Butler's Introduction to the Duke of BuckEvelyn, Hooke, as really men of science; ingham.—“Mr. Wycherly had always laid Waller, Denham, Cowley, Dryden himself, hold of any opportunity of representing to the and Spratt, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, Duke of Buckingham how well Mr. Butler had as literary men and amateurs of science; and deserved of the royal family by writing bis the Duke of Buckingham, the Marquis of inimitable Hudibras, and that it was a reproach Dorchester, and a few other lords, by way to the Court that a person of his loyalty and of the necessary sprinkling of the aristo- wit should suffer in obscurity, and under the wants he did. The Duke seemed always to cracy. In 1663, which was the year when Dryden joined, there were already one hun-hearken to him with attention enough, and, after dred and fifteen members; and the weekly sions to his Majesty. Mr. Wycherly, in hopes some time, undertook to recommend his pretenproceedings of the Society were a regular part to keep him steady to his word, obtained of his of the gossip of the town. Isaac Newton Grace to name a day when he might introduce was then a youth of twenty, concluding his that modest and unfortunate poet to his new studies at Cambridge; but it was not long patron. At last an appointment was made, and before the Society had communications from the place of meeting was agreed to be the him, both mathematical and optical, includ- Roebuck. Mr. Butler and his friend attended ing no less substantial a one than a reflecting accordingly-the Duke joined them-but, as telescope made by his own hands, which they examined and showed to the King in 1668; and, in 1671, by which time he had succeeded Barrow in the mathematical chair at Cambridge, he was elected a member. Such, epitomized as much as possible, is an account of the moral and intellectual phenomena of English society during that period which corresponds with the last seventeen years of Butler's life. Upon such a public drinking, appeared very flat and heavy; at the second bottle brisk and lively, full of wit and learning, and a most agreeable companion; but, before the third bottle was finished, he sunk again into such deep stupidity and dulness, that hardly anybody could have believed him to be the author of a book which abounded with so much wit, learning, and pleasantry. Next morning Mr. Shepherd asked his Lordship's opinion of Butler, who answered, He is like a ninepin, little at both ends, but great in the middle."" Quoted by Mr. Bell from the General Historical Dictionary, 1734-41. the d-1 would have it, the door of the room where they sat was open, and his Grace, who had seated himself near it, observing a pimp of his acquaintance (the creature, too, was a knight) trip by with a brace of ladies, imme kind of business; and from that time to the day diately quitted his engagement to follow another of his death, poor Butler never found the least effect of his promise.". Quoted by Johnson in his "Lives of the Poets," from Packe's "Life of Wycherly." ever, if we guess aright, would he pay a call at all; and most days of the week, when Mr. Longueville or some other crony did not waylay him, it would be his habit, after his hodiernal ramble among the old bookshops 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 lasted, 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 those two elderly persons had their thoughts and their miseries, whatever they were. From these passages, and one or two other stray notices, we are able to form a guess as to Butler's habits after he became a resident in town. He was known to Wycherly, to Hobbes, to Davenant, and, in a general way, as we may fancy, to all the more celebrated wits, Dryden included. There were very few men of any pretensions to literature, either as authors or amateurs, who would miss a casual opportunity of at least seeing the author of Hudibras; and London was not then too large, nor the habits of men, as regards means of meeting at taverns, coffeehouses, and the like, too formal, to prevent such opportunities from being common. There are traditions also to the effect that at first be had offers, from his more influential admirers, of secretaryships and what not, but that, as he "would not accept anything but what was very good," they fell off from him, and left him to himself. On the whole, however, the truth seems to be that there was something about him which unfitted him for making many friends, or being pushed on in the world. Whether from a natural moroseness, or from a morbid shyness which prevented him from seeking those who did not seek him, and even from retaining acquaintances who would have been glad to be intimate with him if they had had any encouragement, he seems to have been more solitary than almost any other men of his time equally known. There were a few persons who Regarding Butler's spiritual relations to cultivated his friendship, and, as it were, the various phenomena of the time in which drew him out in spite of himself; but they he lived, we have the information of his own were mostly men of inferior note themselves, writings. And, first of all, it is abundantly who, having a passion for the society of men clear that he never recanted his aversion to of genius, had fastened on the author of Puritanism, but persevered to the last in his Hudibras as the man of genius whom, by original vocation as the satirist of it and its reason of his very shyness and eccentricity, professors. Besides doing this in short incithey could most easily monopolize. Such a dental writings, some of which seem to have man was the gossip Aubrey, a kind of Bos-been published in periodicals and newspapers, well of his day, who fluttered about from one he continued to do it on the same scale and place of resort to another, and collected in the same systematic form as before by scraps for which we are now much obliged (foolishly enough, we think; for there had to him; such a man perhaps was the Mr. been quite enough of it) going on with his Fleetwood Shepherd, mentioned in one of the Hudibras. After fourteen years of slow foregoing quotations; and such a man, above quarrying, the "Third Part" of this interall, if indeed he was not a man of a higher minable work was given to the world in 1678, class, was Mr. William Longueville, a bench- or two years before his death-a second and er of the Temple, mentioned by a contempo- revised edition of the two preceding parts rary as having been a man of great powers having been published in 1674. How the of talk and of the kindest heart in the world," Third Part" was received we do not know, who had, by industry at the bar, acquired a but probably with less noise than its predecomfortable fortune. This Mr. Longueville cessors. As before, the story was the least is known to have been poor Butler's best of the merits of the poem-a mere thread friend-perhaps the only real friend he had. on which to append all sorts of digressions Three times out of every four that he dined and dissertations. In the first canto we are out, it would be at Mr. Longueville's cham- re-introduced to Hudibras and Ralpho just bers; and if ever in the course of his day's after their adventures with the conjurer, as walk through town he paid a call, it would related in the "Second Part." They begin be by some appointment in which Mr. Lon- to quarrel, and make up their minds to part gueville was concerned. Very seldom, how-company; Hudibras then makes for the well as in his own bitter experience of human fickleness and ingratitude, new food for his constitutional habit of censure. 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 Anti-Puritan as he was, and disposed to making the widow acquainted with the true loyalty in church and state, as on the whole state of the case; whereupon a nocturnal the best arrangement a man could make with masquerade of furies and hobgoblins is got his conscience where all was as bad as it up by the widow, Ralpho assisting, and Hu- could be, the state of public morals and dibras, after being pinched and cudgelled, is manners which the Restoration had brought forced by the ghostly terrors of his situation with it, found no apologist in Butler. A to confess himself a hypocrite and scoundrel. man advanced in life, bred up too in honest In canto second, the poet leaves the knight English ways, and with a natural austerity and the squire altogether, and interpolates, of disposition which had probably always totally without any connection with the saved him from even the more venial forms story, a satire on Puritanism generally in of vice, he seems to have looked about him the shape of a historical recapitulation of at the on-goings of the restored court, and the whole course of the Civil Wars down to the public men of his latter days, with no the Restoration, with references by name to other feelings than those of contempt and Cromwell, Fleetwood, Lentham, Calamy, disgust. There are evidences of this in the Case, Henderson, Owen, Nye, Prynne, and last part of his great poem, where he almost others, both Presbyterians and Independents, shows an intention of falling foul of the and with more detailed but covert allusions existing powers and scourging them as he to the politician Shaftesbury, the quaker had scourged the opposite side; but the Lilburn, &c. Finally, in the third canto, most express evidence of the fact is to be we find the knight, just released from his found in those scraps of prose and verse last scrape by the deceitful Ralpho, taking which he left behind him-jottings, so to counsel with a lawyer in order to obtain the speak, in his commonplace book- to be widow and her property by inveigling her published when he was no more. Here are into a lawsuit; as preliminary to which he two illustrations -the first from the collecwrites her a letter and receives her answer. tion of his "Prose Thoughts upon various And so, the story abruptly breaks off; nor, Subjects," printed in Thyer's Remains; the at the same rate of progress, can any one say second from a short poetical piece there when it might have been finished. published under the title of "A Satire on the Licentiousness of the Age of Charles II.” 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 by-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 Devi. LIVING AGE. VOL. XII. 2. 81. A rabble. 87. A Knight of the Post 88. vorite. 89. A cuckold. apparently the same merciless verdict on 1. A modern politician. 40. A quibbler. conformist. 3. A republican. 4. A politician. 5. A state convert. 6. A risker. 7. A modern states man. 8. A Duke of Bucks. 35. A justice of peace. 98. A lover. 99. A translator. 100. A rebel. 101. A city wit. [man. 109. An insolent man. 120. A ribald. 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 46. An hermetic philos-than this-a positive dissatisfaction of Butopher. 42. An impudent man. 44. A time-server. 45. A prater. 47. An alderman. 61. A factious member. ler'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 propor tion of them are taken from the Puritan or Nonconformist side of things. A 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 entitled "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 Denham; a squib on Philip Nye's beard; two mock panegyrics on Dryden's brother-in-law, the Honorable Edward Howard, on the occasion of a heroic |