Of fairy damsels, met in forest wide,
By knights of Logres, or of Lyones,
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore,
these are all present, all are captivating.
It is natural to wish that, while young, Milton had followed his dominant motive into Arthur's fairy land, and told the story of Galahad and the Holy Grail: the purity that wins the Beatific Vision.
His "Samson Agonistes," in the severest style of Greek tragedy, sets forth his own strength foiled by blindness, mocked by the dull triumphs of the wanton crowd, and triumphant in death. The occasional unrhymed verse of the chorus, not in decasyllabic lines, stands for Milton's curious antipathy for rhyme, in which, when he chose, he excelled. The subtleties and sophistries of Delilah express his idea of one type of womanhood, the other type shines in the steadfast love of the repentant Eve. The poem, with all the strength, has less of the charm of Milton than his other great works.
Milton died in 1674; a poet who in one sense might be styled "self-taught," for while he was so deeply read, his verse was no echo, nor ever can be re-echoed. It is foolish but natural to appraise the relative greatness of great poets, but, Shakespeare apart, it is to the lonely Milton that the world has always awarded the crown of England's greatest.
Samuel Butler.
If we could take the "God-gifted organ-voice of England," Milton, as representing the anti-Royalist parties in the Civil War, and Samuel Butler, with his "Hudibras," as the representative of those who stood for Church and King, we could not hesitate in our choice between the two factions. But Milton's was a soul that dwells apart, making its own special music, while Butler produced a unique epic-satire on the furies and follies of the once triumphant Presbyterians, Independents, and a multitude of wild contending sects. Of Samuel Butler's life but little is known. Born at Strensham in Worcestershire in 1612, he was educated at the school of Worcester, but could not afford to proceed to either university. He was clerk to a justice of the peace, was later in the service of the Countess of Kent, where he had leisure for study, at Wrest in Bedfordshire, during the war, and in the same shire resided with Sir Samuel Luke, an active Presbyterian, who, however, was opposed to the Regicide. Butler thus saw plenty of the people whom, in 1663, he satirized in the first part of "Hudibras". That Presbyterian Don Quixote, with his Independent Squire, Ralph, is the wildest caricature of a type, not of an individual, and the adventures of the pair are merely burlesque. The discussions and descriptions are a tempest of ridicule falling on the fallen Cause in showers of jigging and strangely rhymed octosyllabics, often so piquant that many of them are still commonly quoted though the historic allusions are forgotten. The associations of ideas in the author's mind bring out a learning as multifarious as that of Burton or of Browne; the book was adored at Court, not least by the King, and was pirated; all three parts were put forth by Walton's publisher, Richard Marriot, though they may have been little to the taste of the pacific author of "The Compleat Angler".
Butler seems to have been no roysterer, but a retired, bookish, sardonic humorist, who "asked for nothing and got nothing". The Court wits who sought his acquaintance did not find in him what they expected. He certainly received no notable rewards: and later poets found in him the type of neglected merit. He died in London in 1680.
After a war of Religion in which all the countless factions felt certain of their own infallibility, Butler, a disillusioned wit, saw nothing in the strife but what the saintly Leighton called "a scuffle of drunken men in the dark". The Parliamentarians
Call fire and sword and desolation
A godly thorough Reformation,
Which always must be carried on,
And still be doing, never done,
As if Religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended...
They with more care keep holy-day
The wrong, than others the right way,