Butler had been a great reader, and out of the dryest books of school divinity, Puritan theology, metaphysics, medicine, astrology, mathematics, no matter what, his brain secreted wit as naturally as a field of corn will get so much silex out of a soil as would make flints for a whole arsenal of old-fashioned muskets, and where even Prometheus himself could not have found enough to strike a light with. I do sincerely believe that he would have found fun in a joke of Senator—well, any senator; and that is saying a great deal. I speak of course, of senators at Washington.
Mr. Lowell illustrated his criticism by copious quotations from “Hudibras.” He concluded thus:
It would not be just to leave Butler without adding that he was an honest and apparently disinterested man. He wrote an indignant satire against the vices of Charles the Second’s court. Andrew Marvel, the friend of Milton, and the pattern of incorruptible Republicanism, himself a finer poet and almost as great a wit as Butler—while he speaks contemptuously of the controversialists and satirists of his day, makes a special exception of “Hudibras.” I can fancy John Bunyan enjoying it furtively, and Milton, if he had had such a thing as fun in him, would have laughed over it.
Many greater men and greater poets have left a less valuable legacy to their countrymen than Butler, who has made them the heirs of a perpetual fund of good humor, which is more nearly allied to good morals than most people suspect.
LECTURE IX
POPE
(Thursday Evening, February 6, 1855)
IX
There is nothing more curious, whether in the history of individual men or of nations, than the reactions which occur at more or less frequent intervals.
The human mind, both in persons and societies, is like a pendulum which, the moment it has reached the limit of its swing in one direction, goes inevitably back as far on the other side, and so on forever.