Author of Hudibras.
It is altogether a different, and a far less worthy character that I now bring to the notice of the reader. The man is Samuel Butler,[76] and the book Hudibras—a jingling, doggerel poem, which at the time of its publication had very great vogue in London, and was the literary sensation of the hour in a court which in those same years[77] had received the great epic of Milton without any noticeable ripple of applause.
For myself, I have no great admiration for Hudibras, or for Mr. Samuel Butler. He was witty, and wise in a way, and coarse, and had humor; but he was of a bar-room stamp, and although he could make a great gathering of the court people stretch their sides with laughter, it does not appear that he had any high sense of honor, or much dignity of character.
Mr. Pepys (whose memoirs you have heard of, and of whom we shall have more to tell) says that he bought the book one day in the Strand because everybody was talking of it—which is the only reason a good many people have for buying books; and, he continues—that having dipped into it, without finding much benefit, he sold it next day in the Strand for half-price. But poor Mr. Pepys, in another and later entry, says, “I have bought Hudibras again; everybody does talk so much of it;” which is very like Mr. Pepys, and very like a good many other buyers of books.
Hudibras is, in fact, a great, coarse, rattling, witty lunge at the stiff-neckedness and the cropped heads of the Puritans, which the roistering fellows about the palace naturally enjoyed immensely. He calls the Presbyterians,
“Such, as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun;
Decide all controversies
By infallible artillery;
And prove their doctrines orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks;
Call fire and sword and desolation
A godly, thorough reformation,
Which always must be going on
And still be doing—never done;
As if Religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.
A sect whose chief devotion lies
In odd, perverse antipathies,
In falling out with that or this,
And finding somewhat still amiss.
That with more care keep holyday,
The wrong—than others the right way;
Compound for sins they are inclined to
By damning those they have no mind to.
The self same thing they will abhor
One way, and long another—for:
Quarrel with mince-pies and disparage
Their best and dearest friend plum-porridge;
Fat pig and goose itself oppose,
And blaspheme custard thro’ the nose.”
It is not worth while to tell the story of the poem—which, indeed, its author did not live to complete. Its fable was undoubtedly suggested by the far larger and worthier work of Cervantes; Hudibras and Ralpho standing in the place of the doughty Knight of La Mancha, and Sancho Panza; but there is a world between the two.
Hudibras had also the like honor of suggesting its scheme and measure and jingle to an early American poem—that of McFingal, by John Trumbull—in which our compatriot with less of wit and ribaldry, but equal smoothness, and rhythmic zest, did so catch the humor of the Butler work in many of his couplets that even now they pass muster as veritable parts of Hudibras.[78]
Samuel Butler was the son of a farmer, over in the pretty Worcestershire region of England; but there was in him little sense of charming ruralities; they never put their treasures into his verse. For sometime he was in the household of one of Cromwell’s generals,[79] who lived in a stately country-hall a little way out of Bedford; again, he filled some dependency at that stately Ludlow Castle on the borders of Wales—forever associated with the music of Milton’s “Comus.” It was after the Restoration that he budded out in his anti-Puritan lampoon; but though he pandered to the ruling prejudices of the time, he was not successful in his search for place and emoluments; he quarrelled with those who laughed loudest at his buffoonery and died neglected. His name is to be remembered as that of one of the noticeable men of this epoch, who wrote a poem bristling all through with coarse wit, and whose memory is kept alive more by the stinging couplets which have passed from his pen into common speech than by any high literary merit or true poetic savor. His chief work in verse must be regarded as a happy, witty extravaganza, which caused so riotous a mirth as to be mistaken for valid fame. The poem is a curio of letters—a specimen of literary bric-à-brac—an old, ingeniously enamelled snuff-box, with dirty pictures within the lid.