. "Seas, Cruise of the Vincennes in, "Voyages, Last of The, Aristocracy, Cold Shade of, Atmospheric Waves, Austrian Imposture, 354 177 Dutch, High and Low, 576 693 East, The, Kings of, Authors, Obscure, Autograph Letters, Bank of England, The, Bible Names, Pronunciation of, British Goods, Inferiority of, Brougham's Statesmen, Bulls and Blunders, English and Irish, Burr, Aaron, Last Moments of, Butler's Analogy, Butler, Samuel, Cannon-Ball, Effects of, 125 Epitaphs, 176, 264, 316, 320, 351, 605, 781, 744 658 Episcopal John Gilpin, 818 705 61 128 242 23 733 129, 232 136 191 382 513 91, 148, 240 184 701 469 819 1 Hands, The Use of, 593 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. 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 DCVI. LIVING AGE. VOL. XII. 1 part of Hudibras was given to the world. This is the more remarkable when we remember through what a busy age of literary pro Then duction 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. 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 of clergyman that a Puritan government |