And, courteous briars, nail me through!”
This is better than Rochester’s “Nothing,” and has no smack of Nell Gwynne or of Charles’s court.
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;