Presented with a monumental bust.
The poet’s fate is here in emblem shown,—
He asked for bread, and he received a stone.”
[11.] The Hudibras is a burlesque poem,—a long lampoon, a laboured caricature,—in mockery of the weaker side of the great Puritan party. It is an imaginary account of the adventures of a Puritan knight and his squire in the Civil Wars. It is choke-full of all kinds of learning, of the most pungent remarks—a very hoard of sentences and saws, “of vigorous locutions and picturesque phrases, of strong, sound sense, and robust English.” It has been more quoted from than almost any book in our language. Charles II. was never tired of reading it and quoting from it—
“He never ate, nor drank, nor slept,
But Hudibras still near him kept”—
says Butler himself.
The following are some of his best known lines:—
“And, like a lobster boil’d, the morn
From black to red began to turn.”