entertainments of the evening, I shall claim the prerogatives accruing to such unexpected honours, and in so far depart from the example set by my royal predecessors as to invite your attention to

The Humour of the Poets.

There are few indeed among true English poets who have not occasionally relaxed from the severer majesty of poetic inspiration to indulge their wit in some humorous play with the powers of rhyme. Chaucer and Shakspere delighted in the mirthful vein. Even Milton at rare intervals amused a passing hour with this poetic pastime, and Cowper mingles with his grave and serious verse, numerous sprightly products of this mirthful mood.

It is indeed a curious fact in the history of the human mind that some of the most humorous poems have been written to relieve the sadness, or to lighten the gloom of their author's mind. Several of Cowper's lighter and more amusing poems had their origin in the pleasant converse with which his kind friend Lady Austen sought to engage the poet's attention when depressed by those fits of hopeless dejection which so painfully clouded his latter years. To this

lady we owe the finest of all his poems, "The Task," and by her also the subject was suggested which gave rise to the diverting history of "John Gilpin." The following is the account furnished by Hayley, of the origin of this celebrated ballad: "It happened one afternoon that Lady Austen observed him sinking into increasing dejection: it was her custom on these occasions to try all the resources of her sprightly powers for his immediate relief. She told him the story of John Gilpin (which had been treasured in her memory from her childhood,) to dissipate the gloom of the passing hour. Its effect on the fancy of Cowper had the air of enchantment. He informed her the next morning that convulsions of laughter brought on by his recollection of her story, had kept him waking during the greatest part of the night, and that he had turned it into a ballad."

No poet, however, has devoted himself with the same deliberation, or with the same success, to the worship of the laughing muse, as Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras. It is a curious fact, however, that Butler, though perhaps the most witty writer in our language, is one of whom the least is known. Ilis father was a small farmer at Strensham, in Worcestershire, where he was born about the year 1612.

He was engaged at one time as clerk to a country justice, and at a later period appears to have acted as private secretary and librarian to Elizabeth, Countess of Kent, under whose patronage he enjoyed access to the best society, and revelled in the free use of an extensive library. The incident, however, that appears to have exercised the most lasting influence upon him, was his engaging in the service of Sir Samuel Luke, a knight of ancient family, who held a military command under Oliver Cromwell, and is generally believed to have been the prototype of Hudibras, the hero of his satirical poem. Upon the restoration of Charles II. to his father's throne the satyrist appears to have heartily espoused the cause of royalty, and to have indulged with reckless freedom in the gaiety and dissipation of that licentious era. Contrasting the license of Charles's profligate court with the decorum and the strict morals that had prevailed under the Protector, the poet revenges himself on the system whose restraints had no doubt proved irksome to him in the well-regulated household of the Bedfordshire knight. Hudibras, the hero of this poem, is a presbyterian justice, who sets forth like another Don Quixote, for the reformation of abuses, accompanied by his squire Ralph, an independent clerk, with whom he carries on

L

an unwearying controversy, by means of which the witty satirist is able to keep up a continuous strain of most pungent and amusing dialogue. Such is the pointed humour and truth of his burlesque couplets, that many of them have become proverbial, and retain their popularity notwithstanding the total change of His fate was manners and habits since he wrote. that of many wits. After living in familiar intercourse with the most eminent men of his day, and marrying a lady of good family and considerable fortune, he was indebted to the charity of a friend for his rescue from absolute starvation, and the same generous source provided for him a grave in the church yard of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, London.

I shall not, however, detain you from the poetic humorists by such details as have been preserved of some of their lives. Jonathan Swift, the witty Dean of St. Patrick's, and one of the ablest of English satirists, owes his reputation more to his writings in prose than in verse; and few indeed among juvenile readers have failed to peruse the voyages of Gulliver to Lilliput and Brobdignag, or his strange satire directed against the speculative philosophers of his age, under the picture of the Flying Island. Dr. Walcott, is another well known satirist of a more recent date,

familiar to all by his assumed name of Peter Pindar, while, inferior to few of his predecessors in wit and satirick humour. Thomas Moore, the lyric poet of Ireland, has employed the same amusing talent in assailing, like his predecessors, the extravagances of his contemporaries and the failings of political opponents; but his allusions to characters and events are so closely dependant on the political movements that gave rise to them, that very many of them are unintelligible to the ordinary reader. Satire, however, is an altogether distinct department of poetic composition, and often greatly inferior to the genial inspiration of a lively fancy which gives birth to the unprompted humour of the poets.