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Russia, American Sympathies with,
and the Allies,

46

Sabbath Bells,

627 United States and Russia,
63

121 Washington Medal, The,

Watch-paper Inscriptions,
Waverley Novels, Authorship of,
Waves, Speed of,

560 Wedding Rings, Posies from,

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485

270

664

384

677

73, 484

Salic Law in France,

23

Scott, Walter, Anecdote of,

554

Weights and Measures, Improved,
Whale Fishery,

375

274

Scrooby,

337

White-clad Sect, The,

46

Sebastopol, Great Explosion at,

265

Window Inscriptions,

470

Sermon, Quaint,

704

Witchcraft, Cure for,

311

Silver, Export of,

374

Witness-box, Science in the,

659

Sneezing, Philosophy of,

559

Woman and the Moon,

95, 158

Snow Power,

511

Worlds, Plurality of,

360, 403

Spanish Play-bill,

Speculation, Mania for,

270 Yacht-sailing with the Baltic Fleet,

140

61

Spirit-rapping-no Novelty,

247 Zoological Gardens,

769

Stars-the Flowers of Heaven,

311

Steam Hammer,

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Sultan, The, and the French Emperor,

572

Swift's Copyrights,

79 Unexpected Effects of the War,
An Untimely Surrender,

123

252

Table-Talk,

577

Tam O'Shanter, Illustrated,

703

Necessities of the Peace Question,
Peace and the French Alliance,

376, 433

380

Tavern Signs, Poetical,

The Russian War in Asia,

440

242

Thackeray's Miscellanies,

114

“As in a Glass, Darkly,"

502

Thiers' History of the Consulate,

138

Abject Language and Ideas,

506

Toads, Venom of,

French Desire for Peace,

573

372

Travellers' Contrivances,

365

Prospect of Peace,

628

Trust, Criminal Breach of,

124

Basis of Negotiations,

629, 637

Turkish Government, The,

503

Progress of

66

764

Turtle, Introduction of,

Bussia's Vis Inertiæ,

631

73

Treaty of Adrianople and the Austrian Points,

633

TALES.

Conservative Peace,

635

Baby-Trooper, The,

Fortunes of Glencore,
How I became an Egyptian,

Kate Coventry,
Land Shark, The,
Mad Painter, The,

164 News of Peace,

694

How I grew into an Old Maid,

80, 687 British Ministry and Peace,

97 Parliament and the

66

597 Remonstrants against "

471, 746 The Promised

606 Congress of Paris,

791

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696

697, 760

761

763

762

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 606.-5 JANUARY, 1856.

From the North British Review.

1. The Poetical Works of Samuel Butler.
With Life, Critical Dissertation, and
Explanatory Notes, by the Rev. GEORGE
GILFILLAN. 2 vols. Edinburgh, James

Nichol. 1854.

part of Hudibras was given to the world. This is the more remarkable when we remember through what a busy age of literary production Butler thus contrived to remain silent. He had twenty-eight clear years of life before the outbreak of the Civil Wars-years during which he might actually, as a young man, have welcomed into print the last literary performances of such surviving veterans of the Elizabethan age as Ben Jonson, Donne, Drayton, Chapman, and Ford; but though other young Englishmen of this time, such as Waller, Davenant, Suckling, Milton, Denham, and Cowley, made good their entrance into literature before these giants of the elder generation had finally quitted the stage, Butler saw them vanish without so much as attempting to put himself in any other relation to them than that of an ordinary reader. Then came the period of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth, coinciding with all that portion of Butler's life which elapsed between his twenty-ninth and his forty-ninth year. This period, being one of turmoil and political excitement, as well as of Puritan government, was not so favorable to the purer kinds of literary production, i. e., to imaginative and calm speculative or historical literature, as the age which it had succeeded. Still it had an ample literature, peculiar to itself— a literature, at least, of satire and incessant theological and political discussion; and, in one way or another, some at home and others in exile, such writers as Hobbes, Herrick, Izaak Walton, and the dramatist Shirley, all of whom had been past middle age before the civil wars-began, and such younger writers as Waller, Davenant, Suckling, Milton, Denham, and Cowley, who, as has just been mentioned, had taken their degree in literature before the same revolutionary outburst, continued, during the era of Puritan ascendency, to stand before the world as active men of letters. Shirley, poor fellow, his source of livelihood cut off by the suppression of the stage in 1642, had gone into the country to teach a school and live on his reputation as an ex-dramatist; Herrick, ejected from his charge in Devonshire, as not being the kind

2. The Poetical Works of Samuel Butler. Edited, with Memoir and Notes, by ROBERT BELL. 8vo. London, John W. Parker & Son. 1855. THROUGH either of these editions of Butler's Poetical Works the new generation of bookbuyers and readers have a good opportunity of becoming acquainted with a writer who, though two-hundred years have elapsed since he lived, is still, in some respects, unique in our literature. The age is passed, indeed, in which any one would be likely to take Butler's poems, as some rough country gentleman, of last century, is said to have done, as his sole literary companion and general cabinet of wisdom; and most readers who have reached their climacteric have already a copy of Butler on their shelves, and have pretty well made up their minds as to what the man was, and as to the amount of service for any good purpose that is still to be got out of him. Young fellows, however, who have to complete their education, cannot do so without at least dipping into Hudibras; and, besides, the farther an old author such as Butler recedes into the past, and the more the miscellany of things interposed between him and us is increased by the advance of time, the less of him remains vital, and the more nearly is he reduced to his true and permanent essence. And hence not alone for the sake of the young fellows in question - may it be worth while to devote a few pages to what otherwise might be thought a somewhat fusty subject. If Dryden, Addison, Swift, and Foote, are deemed worthy of resuscitation, even in the midst of a war with Russia, and a hundred other grave contemporary matters, who will have the heart to object to an hour's gossip about old Samuel Butler? One peculiarity about Butler, as one of our British authors, is that he was fifty years of age before he was so much as heard of by his / contemporaries. He was born in 1612, and it was not till the end of 1662 that the first of clergyman that a Puritan government

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Butler. It was not till after the Restoration that- amid the general gathering of the old wits from their haunts, around the throne of Charles II., and the sudden crop of new and younger wits evoked by the license afforded to dramatic riot and all that had hitherto been repressed the face or the name of Butler emerged to challenge notice.

obscure period in Butler's life which elapsed' before the Restoration, the literary impulse first seized him, what was the precise nature of that impulse, and what were the circumstances which retarded so long the public exhibition of his talent. For this purpose let us glance at the little that is known of this portion of his life.

could tolerate, was probably humming over their exile in France and Holland, we hear his old songs and fancies and writing new not a word of any publication pro or con, in ones to amuse his leisure in some cottage verse or in prose, bearing the name of Samuel near his old parish; Hobbes was abroad, teaching mathematics to Charles II. in his exile, and writing his "Leviathan" and other works, which he afterwards came over to England to publish; Waller, Davenant, Denham, and Cowley, also lived abroad as royalist exiles, till towards the end of Cromwell's Protectorate, when they were permitted to return and write as much as they chose, and Of course it cannot be that Butler was poswhen Waller, at least, thought it wise to itively idle with his pen all this time. He make his peace with Cromwell and become was not heard of as a writer prior to 1662; one of his panegyrists; Suckling had died but the man who then came forth with such almost at the beginning of his royal master's a poem as the first part of Hudibras must troubles; Izaak Walton, having quitted his have had a good deal of quiet practice beforecloth-shop, in Chancery Lane, in 1644, was hand in the art of putting his thoughts on padividing his time between fishing, the prepara-per. It becomes of some importance, therefore, tion of his book on that art, and pious recol- to find out, if possible, at what point in that lections of Donne, Hooker, Wotton, and other good men whom he had known before the king's head had been cut off; and, lastly, Milton, the true literary representative of Puritanism and the Commonwealth, though he had forsaken for the time the softer muse of his youth, was still conspicuously at work, shaking the very soul of Royalism and Prelacy, by his noble prose treatises in defence of the Revolution and its leaders. Nay, there were others, not mentioned in the above list, whose literary career began, or was continued, during the stormy period of the Commonwealth. The manhood of the great Jeremy Taylor corresponds with this period, which he did not long survive; Richard Baxter, and other non-conforming divines, became famous during it; the quaint Fuller then penned many of his writings; the philosophic Sir Thomas Browne, calm as a mollusc in the midst of the social perturbations, was pursuing his fantastic speculations in his study at Norwich; the vagabond trooper Cleveland, now abroad with his Royalist associates, and now risking his neck in England, was inditing his racketty squibs against the Roundheads, with especial reference to that grand topic of fun with all the satirists of his party, Oliver's copper nose; and Milton's friend, honest Andrew Marvell, had at least given evidence to those who knew him of his capacity of writing well on the other side. Yet, in the midst of all this cross-fire of writings from Royalists and Puritans, from poets and philosophers, from Englishmen at home and Englishmen in

Butler was the son of a substantial farmer in Worcestershire. He received a very good school education at the Cathedral school of Worcester, under a master who had a considerable reputation in his day for turning out pupils who afterwards became distinguished. It is not certainly known whether he was sent to either of the Universities. There is a vague account of his having been at Cambridge, and there is a still more vague account of his having been at Oxford; but Mr. Bell is disposed, and we think justly, to believe that neither account is correct, and that Butler never received any university education. If he was at either of the Universities, however, we can well suppose that it was not then or there that he began to write verses. It is easy to see, from the nature of his writings, after he did become a writer, that he never could have had anything about him of that overflowing productive disposition, that rich imitative instinct, which belongs to the young sons of Apollo, and which made his contemporaries, Milton and Cowley, poets even in their teens. Milton, a fond disciple at college of all that was best in classical as well as in modern poetry, was already himself a writer

of sweet verse; and Cowley was but a flowing-haired child when, meeting with Spenser's "Faery Queene," the imitative impulse seized him, and he began to lisp in numbers,

"The Muses did young Cowley raise;

They stole him from his nurse's arms,
Fed him with sacred love of praise,
And taught him all their charms."

ishing Justice of Peace in his native county of Worcestershire. While in this service he is said to have had some thoughts of turning painter; and, as late as the middle of last century, there were some portraits and other pictures at Earl's Croombe which were said to have been painted by Butler during his residence there. They do not seem to have been worth much; and, though Butler kept A much tougher subject, if we guess aright, up his taste for the art in after-life so as to was young Butler, and not the kind of infant become acquainted with Samuel Cooper, the for any Muse to dandle. "When but a first English portrait-painter of his day, his boy," says Aubrey, "he would make obser- own practice in it was probably never more vations and reflections on everything one than that of an amateur. There was more said or did, and censure it to be either well feasibility in the plan which he is said also or ill;" and, wherever Aubrey got his infor- to have entertained about this time of becommation, it has a singular smack of truth about ing a lawyer, or at least a country attorney; it. Not a flowing-haired poetic child of the and, as evidence of some such intention, there Cowley stamp at all, mildly stealing away is not only a tradition of his having entered from his companions into the fields to read, himself at Gray's Inn, but also the fact of but a decidedly hard-headed if not stubby- his having left behind him among his papers haired boy, keeping uncomfortably near to a syllabus of Coke upon Littleton, drawn up people when they were talking, and "censur- in law French in his own handwriting. ing things to be either well or ill;" such, Not even to the dignity of an independent even without Aubrey's hint, but merely on country attorney, however, was Butler to be the principle of the boy being father to the promoted. From being law-clerk to the man, should we have conceived young Butler Worcestershire Justice of Peace, we find him to have been in his school-days. If he did -through what intermediate stages of go to college he doubtless made the most of amateur portrait-painting, and law-studenthis time there, and read books and acquired ship, is unknown — transferred to a superior knowledge assiduously, as would become a situation, as secretary, or the like, in the sensible farmer's son, receiving education at household of the Countess of Kent, at Wrest, some expense to his family; but to Spenser's in Bedfordshire. Here, besides leisure to Faery Queene," and all that class of influ- amuse himself with painting and music, he ences, we suspect he would have presented a had the advantage of an excellent library, cuticle of greater resistance than either Mil- and of the conversation of the learned Selton or Cowley did. In short, if he was at den, then steward of the Countess's estate, the University, we can well believe that he and, according to Aubrey's account, privately left it without ever having perpetrated verse married to her. It is this circumstance of at all, or at least anything more than a few Selden's being domesticated at Wrest at the lines of such hard downright doggrel as time of Butler's service there that enables would not matter much one way or another. us to form a guess as to dates. Mr. Bell, He may, however, have written good sound finding that Selden spent the Parliamentary prose, of a quality quite sufficient for his pur-recess of the year 1628 at the Earl of Kent's poses as a scholar.

44

seat in Wrest, employing himself in the prepAccording to the very scanty notices that aration of his work on the Arundel marbles, remain, that period of Butler's life which assigns that year as the probable date of extends from his early youth till after the Butler's admission into the Countess' serRestoration, is to be considered as dividing vice. This supposition seems quite untenitself into three parts. First of all, from his able. Butler would then have been only early youth onwards, for an uncertain num- sixteen years of age, and there would be no ber of years, but probably till about 1639, room at all for his prior service at Earl's when he would be twenty-seven years of age, Croombe, not to speak of his painting and we find him acting as clerk in the service of other occupations attributed to him while Thomas Jeffries, of Earl's Croombe, a flour-there. It seems more natural to suppose,

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