Several minor poems have been attributed to Butler, but most of them have been considered spurious. Some, however, are admitted—one of which is a humorous skit against the Royal Society, who were supposed at that day to be too minutely subtle. It is called "An Elephant in the Moon." "Some learned astronomers think they have made a great discovery, but it is really owing to a mouse and some gnats having got into their telescope."
The light, short metre in which Butler composed his comic narrative was well suited to the subject, and corresponded to the "swift iambics" of Archilochus. Dryden says that double rhymes are necessary companions of burlesque writing. Addison, however, is of opinion that Hudibras "would have made a much more agreeable figure in heroics," to which Cowden Clarke replies, "Why, bless his head! the whole and sole intention of the poem is mock heroic, and the structure of the verse is burlesque," and he also tells us that Butler's rhymes constitute one feature of his wit. Certainly he had some strange terminations to his lines. Hudibras speaking of hanging Sidrophel and Whackum says:—
"I'll make them serve for perpendiclars
As true as e'er were used by bricklayers."
One of the bear-baiting mob annoys Rapho's steed, who
"Began to kick, and fling, and wince,
As if he'd been beside his sense,
Striving to disengage from thistle
That gall'd him sorely under his tail."
Again we have:—
"An ancient castle that commands
Th' adjacent parts, in all the fabric
You shall not see one stone, nor a brick."
The astrologers made an instrument to examine the moon to
"Tell what her diameter per inch is;
And prove that she's not made of green cheese."
By the interchange which often takes place between the poetical and ludicrous, this roughness of versification, then allowable, appears now so childish, that Lamb and Cowden Clark mistook it for humour. But we might extract from the writers of that day many ridiculous rhymes, evidently intended to be serious.