Such is the meagre outline, with which as we have done, that he did not leave Earl's immediately antecedent to the King's recall. Croombe for Wrest till about the year 1639; When the King had returned, it would be in which year, as Mr. Bell himself informs us, natural, amid the general change of system, Selden, by the death of the Earl of Kent, for Presbyterian knights and county magisbecame permanently domesticated in the trates to sink into comparative idleness and household of the Countess at Wrest, and obscurity, and for their secretaries, especially that on a more intimate footing than when if of Royalist connections, to look about for the Earl had been alive. The fact that But-other situations. ler is always represented by his biographers as having entered the service of the Countess we must be content, of the first forty-eight of Kent, seems to confirm this; and in other years of Butler's life. It is possible, indeed, respects it accords with the facts. If Butler that farther research might disclose addidid enter this service in 1639, when he was tional facts, or at least verify or disprove the in his twenty-eighth year, he may have conjectures we have ventured to make as to remained in it till 1651, in which year the the dates of such facts as are known. Countess died, leaving Selden her executor Meanwhile, what concerns us is to ascertain, and part-heir; and still there would be if possible, at what point in the life, as thus ample time left for a third and different ser- laid out, Butler first felt his vocation to litervice which Butler is said to have discharged ature, and first secretly practised the talent before the Restoration—namely, that of which was afterwards to make him famous. secretary or general man of business to Sir Now, if our chronology is correct, we have Samuel Luke of Cople Hoo, in the same little hesitation in saying that it was somecounty of Bedfordshire. Sir Samuel was one where in what we have represented as the of the leading Presbyterians of the county, middle portion of his adult life prior to the and a Justice of Peace. He had been a Restoration— that is, during his service with Colonel in the Parliamentary army during the Countess of Kent at Wrest, in Bedfordthe Civil Wars, and Member in the Long shire, from 1639 to 1651. shire, Parliament for Bedfordshire; and, though with others of the Presbyterian leaders, he had shrunk back from the extreme proceedings of the Parliament about the time of the King's death, and had, in consequence, been one of those members whom the army leaders and Independents "secluded" about this time from farther attendance in the House, he yet appears to have retained his zeal in the general cause of the Revolution, and to have been an active magistrate in Bedford- there is not one which we can ascertain to shire under Cromwell's government. The have been published prior to 1660, or, at all precise nature of Butler's duties in his ser- events, to 1659, if indeed any one of them vice cannot be known; but if he entered it was published prior to Hudibras itself in 1663. after 1651, when the Civil Wars in England But, though none of them was certainly pubwere over, and the Commonwealth was an lished before this period, there are one or two established fact, they may very well have of them which were certainly written before been such as a secretary, though of Royalist it. Among these, the earliest to which we connections and sentiments himself, might can assign a probable date is a piece of rude consistently enough discharge for a Presby-doggrel, calling itself a "Ballad," and seemterian master. As to the duration of this service, however, we are totally uninformed. We have assumed it to have begun in 1651, and it may have continued till 1660 or thereabouts―i. e., through the period of the first Rump, and the Protectorships of Cromwell and his son Richard, down to the confusions of the second Rump and Monk's intrigues We found this opinion on the evidence afforded by what remains of his writings, in addition to Hudibras. Of all these writings whether those included in the "Genuine Remains," published from the actual manuscripts by Mr. Thyer of Manchester in 1759, and which are indubitably authentic, or such other casual pieces in prose or verse, not included among these, as there is any probable ground for believing to have been really his ingly meant as a squib against Cromwell, "His face is round and decent As is your dish or platter, "As close as a goose But, indeed, it is no such matter. "On both sides of th' aforesaid Are eyes, but th' are not matches, To be seen two fair Does all beholders strike, - “He has no skull, 't is well known From running about his shoulders." Sat a Parliament House To hatch the royal gull; And Oliver came forth Noll." The topic of this piece of doggrel fixes its date at about 1656-1657, when the propriety of Oliver's exchanging the title of Protector for that of King was a matter of general discussion. Butler, among others, had his notions on the subject, of which he relieved himself, for his own satisfaction, or probably for the amusement of those about him, as above. After the death of Cromwell, and amid the confusions of Richard's brief Protectorate and the second Rump, there was less reason for reserve in such expressions of opinion; and, accordingly, during the year imAnd so on, through a score or so of stan- mediately preceding the Restoration, Butler's zas more, the last of which, containing an pen seems to have been somewhat busy. Beallusion to the King and Parliament as both sides other scraps, there is one prose piece of still extant, and to the civil wars as still rag-some length, the composition of which may ing, enables one to assign the year 1648, or be certainly attributed to the year 1659-1660, thereby, as the probable date of the compo- though it remained unpublished till aftersition. Such as it is, it is the first authentic piece from Butler's pen that remains to us; and that which comes nearest to it in point of time is a short prose tract, entitled "The Case of King Charles I. truly stated," originally published from the manuscript in 1691, by an anonymous editor, after Butler's death, and reprinted by Thyer. This tract is in the form of a reply to a pamphlet, entitled "King Charles' Case, or an Appeal to all Rational Men concerning his Trial," prepared by John Cook, Master of Gray's Inn, solicitor to the Parliament in the proceedings against the King, and afterwards executed as one of the chief regicides. The pamphlet was put in circulation with others after the King's death, in defence of the policy of the Commonwealth leaders; and Butler appears to have tried his hand at writing an answer, with the intention of publishing it some time or other. He never did so, however, and it was found among his papers. It may be assumed to have been written some time between 1649 and 1654, the anonymous editor of 1691 speaking of it as having been " penned about forty years since." Next, in point of certain date, among Butler's remains, is a piece of doggrel similar in style to that above quoted, entitled, "A Ballad about the Parliament which deliberated about making Oliver King." It begins: wards. This piece consists of "Two Speeches made in the Rump-Parliament when it was restored by the Officers of the Army in the year 1659," the said speeches being mockharangues, invented by Butler, and put, the one into the mouth of an old Presbyterian member of the House, who is indignant at all that has been done by the Army during the last ten years; and the other into the mouth of an Independent, or Army-man, who hates the Presbyterians. The composition is one of some vigor; and the writer makes the two debaters abuse each other, very much as Hudibras and Ralph do in the poem, only in sober earnest, and so as to produce an impression unfavorable both to a continuance of miltary rule or Independency, and to a revival of mere Parliamentary government without a royal head. Had the pamphlet been published, it would really have done some service in the cause of the Restoration, while that question was being debated, and Monk's intentions were uncertain. It is evident, in short, that Butler took a great interest in that question; and it is possible that, though the compositlon just mentioned was not printed, he may about this time have contributed other pieces of a political tenor which did find their way into circulation. The result of this brief investigation is, that it was not till about the 37th year of Butler's as true. If there was less of poetry proper in England in that age of social convulsion, there was more of that kind of poetry which consists in social and political allusion put into verse. Balked of any more effective way of age, and when, according to our chronology, | throughout the kingdom. In a somewhat he was in the service of the Countess of Kent, different sense, Denham's conceit may be taken at her seat in Bedfordshire, that he began to use his pen for anything like a literary purpose, and that from that time he used it only sparingly, in occasional pieces of verse and of prose satire against the Puritans, till about the eve of the Restoration, when, being then giving vent to their hatred of the Puritans, in Sir Samuel Luke's service in the same the Royalists took their revenge in abundance county of Bedfordshire, or just about to quit of satirical squibs and ballads. Just as now that service, he found himself a sufficiently ex- we sometimes see a shrewd middle-aged citizen, pert writer to wish to appear as such, and or country-squire, who never suspected himcapable not only of throwing off political self of any literary tendency, suddenly moved pamphlets suited for the time, but also of by his interest in some controversy to write to planning and preparing a burlesque poem of the newspapers, or perhaps to pen a pamphlet, some length. and by that one fatal act parting with his liberty forever after, and selling himself, body and soul, to the printer's devil, so it was then. Rough old cavaliers, rather shaky in their syntax, furbished it up for the occasion, that they might have a slap at the Roundheads one way if they could not have it in another; and fellows who had never found the legitimate source of poetica! inspiration at twenty in their mistress's eyebrow, were inspired at last, at forty, by Oliver Cromwell's nose. If a sample is wanted, take the following, two scraps from a mountain of similar stuff: This account, probable on external grounds, corresponds with the impression we have of Butler's character. Always a shrewd, industrious, and reading man, with a quantity of grim crabbed satire in him, which may have come out in his talk, he was evidently, as we have already said, not one of that class of writers who, like Milton and Cowley, take naturally from their childhood to literary effort, as ducklings do to the water. He could always, we have no doubt, write excellent business-prose; but he may have been comparatively advanced in life before the idea occurred to him of breaking up this business prose, and enriching it, and fining it, and putting all his wit, and force, and power of learned allusion into it, so as to fit it for the purposes of literature. Much more may it have required a distinct stimulus from without to put the idea into his head of rising above his prose altogether and becoming a poet. Such a stimulus he found at last in the unusual social and political incidents of his time acting on his long constitutional and acquired antipathy to the Puritans. It was antipathy to the Puritans that caused Butler in middle life, at a time when he was probably known by his Bedfordshire neighbors only as a hardheaded and somewhat crusty and eccentric man of business, to become an author and a poet. He was not the only man who was so affected. Denham, in a mock-address, in the name of the poets of England, to the Long Parliament, declares that one effect of their proceedings had been to make the whole nation, including King Charles himself, poets. It was certainly no arrogance in Butler, The drift of this lame conceit is, that the Par- even if he had never written anything before, liament had made at least one of the incentives to think that he could do better than this. to poetry, namely, poverty, general enough The main qualification that of positive irre "Cromwell wants neither wardrobe nor armour; his face is natural buff, and his skin may furnish him with a rusty coat-of-mail. You would think he had been christened in a lime-pit, and tanned alive; but his countenance still continues mangy. We cry out against superstition, and yet we worship a piece of wainscot, and idolize an unblanched almond. Certainly 'tis no human visage, but the emblem of a mandrake, one scarce handsome enough to have been the progeny of Hecuba, had she whelped him."— Pamphlet of the year 1649. "Of all professions in the town, The brewer's trade hath gained renown; "He dives for riches down to the bottom, - Song of 1651-1658. We concilable dislike to the Puritans, and their Royalists during the period of Cromwell's whole mode of thought, speech, and action-government. he had in perfection. No one can understand In prose, Butler, once he had begun, could Butler who fails distinctly to conceive this. never have had any peculiar difficulty. His antipathy to the Puritans in all their have his own information, indeed, that he was branches and denominations, from the most by no means one of your easy scribblers, who moderate Presbyterian to the most fanatical have no trouble in dashing off a page, but a sectary and Fifth-monarchy man, was no as- slow, serious, deliberate writer, for whom evsumed feeling; it was an honest inborn aver-ery sentence had its own pangs. His labor sion, an absolute incapacity of finding any-in putting his sense and wit into adequate thing in that order of ideas or things with prose, however, must have been as nothing which he could sympathize; a crabbed con- compared with that which he at first found stitutional disgust with it all as cant, humbug, in cramming it into appropriate jingle. His hypocrisy, and delusion. A man, whose habit matchless success at last was the result not it was to "censure things to be either well or only of perpetual care spent on every line as ill," there were probably very few things that he wrote it, even after he had thoroughly he would in any circumstances have censured acquired the knack of versification, but also, to be well; but there could not by possibility as we think, of considerable experiment in have been an ensemble of things more calcu- the beginning before he hit on the exact lated to provoke his perpetual ill-censure than that in the midst of which he found himself. Like Swift, an obstinately descendental man, or bigot for the hard terrestrial sense of things, and yet living in an age when transcendentalism had broken loose, and seemed to be whirling heaven and earth together, he must have plodded about Bedfordshire with a kind of sneering conviction on his face that very few besides himself still knew it to be only Bedfordshire, and not a county in some celestial kingdom. The more he saw of the Puritans in his own neighborhood, and the farther that party advanced, throughout the nation at large, from their first beginnings of zeal to their last exhibitions of religious and political enthusiasm, the more they became to him an object of satire; and if, at Sir Samuel Luke's or anywhere else, he was thrown much among their chief men, so as to have opportunities of observing them, he must have taken notes" rarely. Nor was it strange that a man of his extraordinary natural wit, and extensive familiarity as a reader with all sorts of books—a painter, too, and therefore akin to an author already should think of doing as others were doing around him, and putting down some of his observations in black and white. Beginning, therefore, perhaps, with some such doggrel ballad against Cromwell as that which we have quoted as the first known production of his pen, he went on, as we suppose, inditing scraps of prose and verse for his own private gratification, some of which, however, not now to be traced, may If Butler, while yet in search of his proper have had a contraband circulation among the literary form or mode, had penned this Pin knack or trick that suited him. We have "And as the Pagans heretofore As Did their own handiworks adore, The creatures of imagination, "who first found out that curse, T' imprison and confine his thoughts in verse, To hang so dull a clog upon his wit, daric passage (it is one of his), only fancy | in his favorite octosyllabic verse, his satirical leisure. For some ten years, then, before the Restoration, we are to conceive Butler carrying on a sort of preparatory authorship in private, jotting down, partly in prose and partly Hoo. From that moment Hudibras existed But, though Hudibras was planned and |