and most days of the week, when Mr. | tations. In the first canto we are re-introLongueville or some other crony did not duced to Hudibras and Ralpho just after waylay him, it would be his habit, after his their adventures with the conjuror, as rehodiernal ramble among the old book-lated in the "Second Part." They begin shops and other similar temptations, to return quietly home to his prose and his octosyllabics. Whether Mrs. Butler remained long alive to make his evenings at home more cheery for him; and if so, what thoughts of her old days and their vanished chances passed through her head as, sitting on one side of the fire with her knitting, she saw him silently worming on the other among his books and papers, history does not tell us. And yet the life of every man and woman that once lived and is now dead, was, like our own while it lasted, an infinite series of small sensitive advances through a medium of circumstances; and every day of each such life contained twenty-four complete hours, and every hour of the twenty-four contained sixty minutes, and each minute of every successive sixty had to be gone through individually, and enjoyed or endured to the full. And so, though it is two hundred years, or about eight trillions of pulse-beats since Butler trudged about London, and Mrs. Butler waited for him in Rose Street, that time really was once, and these two elderly persons had their thoughts and their miseries whatever they were. Regarding Butler's spiritual relations to the various phenomena of the time in which he lived, we have the information of his own writings. And, first of all, it is abundantly clear that he never recanted his aversion to Puritanism, but persevered to the last in his original vocation as the satirist of it and its professors. Besides doing this in short incidental writings, some of which seem to have been published in periodicals and newspapers, he continued to do it on the same scale and in the same systematic form as before by (foolishly enough, we think; for there had been quite enough of it) going on with his Hudibras. After fourteen years of slow quarrying, the "Third Part" of this interminable work was given to the world in 1678, or two years before his death-a second and revised edition of the two preceding parts having been published in 1674. How the "Third Part" was received we do not know, but probably with less noise than its predecessors. As before, the story was the least of the merits of the poem-a mere thread on which to append all sorts of digressions and disser to quarrel and make up their minds to part company; Hudibras then makes for the widow's, to swear he has performed his vow in the matter of the whipping, and to ask her hand in reward; Ralpho, however, has his revenge by going there before him, and making the widow acquainted with the true state of the case; whereupon a nocturnal masquerade of furies and hobgoblins is got up by the widow, Ralpho assisting, and Hudibras, after being pinched and cudgelled, is forced by the ghostly terrors of his situation to confess himself a hypocrite and scoundrel. In canto second, the poet leaves the knight and the squire altogether, and interpolates, totally without any connection with the story, a satire on Puritanism generally in the shape of a historical recapitulation of the whole course of the Civil Wars down to the Restoration, with references by name to Cromwell, Fleetwood, Lentham, Calamy, Case, Henderson, Owen, Nye, Prynne, and others, both Presbyterians and Independents, and with more detailed but covert allusions to the politician Shaftesbury, the quaker Lilburn, &c. Finally, in the third canto, we find the knight, just released from his last scrape by the deceitful Ralpho, taking counsel with a lawyer in order to obtain the widow and her property by inveigling her into a lawsuit ; as preliminary to which he writes her a letter and receives her answer. And so, the story abruptly breaks off; nor, at the same rate of progress, can any one say when it might have been finished. But though Butler continued to lash the Puritans, both retrospectively by references to the Commonwealth period, and also by singling out subjects of ridicule from among them in their reduced condition as Nonconformists and Sectaries, Puritanism was by no means the sole subject of his satire. Indeed, it had never been so. In the earlier parts of his Hudibras, although satire of Puritanism and the Puritans constituted the direct and main drift of the story and its incessant argumentations and disquisitions, yet, as all who are acquainted with the poem know, there were passages innumerable, glancing off from the main topic at social abuses and bye-topics-at quackery in medicine; at the absurdities of the law and the frauds The wrong side outward, like a juggler's pocket; * * * * * * of its practitioners; at astrology and false [ Twice have men turned the world (that silly learning; at statecraft and its tricks; at blockhead) the virtuosi of the Royal Society and their experiments; at love, widows, matrimony, and the foibles of men and women in general. And so, even more conspicuously, in the "Third Part" of the poem, notwithstanding the attempt made in the second canto to hash up the old subject so as to serve it afresh to the cloyed public palate. In short, though Butler was consistent in his old hatred to the end of his life, he found in the new social condition in which his old age was cast, as well as in his own bitter experience of human fickleness and ingratitude, new food for his constitutional habit of censure. For those who heretofore sought private holes Nor did Butler confine himself to general and wholesale denunciations. He dissected contemporary society into its specific parts and atoms-statesmen, lawyers, poets, physicians, divines, wits, &c., Anti-Puritan as he was, and disposed to loyalty in church and state, as on the whole the best arrangement a man could and returned apparently the same mermake with his conscience where all was as ciless verdict on each part that he did on bad as it could be, the state of public the whole. The most interesting and commorals and manners which the Restora- plete of all his prose writings, for example tion had brought with it, found no apolo--that which, under the name of "Chargist in Butler. A man advanced in life, bred up too in honest English ways, and with a natural austerity of disposition which had probably always saved him from even the more venial forms of vice, he seems to have looked about him at the on-goings of the restored court, and the public men of his latter days, with no other feelings than those of contempt and disgust. There are evidences of this in the last part of his great poem, where he almost shows an intention of falling foul of the existing powers and scourging them as he had scourged the opposite side; but the most express evidence of the fact is to be found in those scraps of prose and verse which he left behind him -jottings, so to speak, in his commonplace-book-to be published when he was no more. Here are two illustrations-the first from the collection of his "Prose Thoughts upon various Subjects," printed in Thyer's Remains; the second from a short poetical piece there published under the title of "A Satire on the Licentiousness of the Age of Charles II.” "Princes that have lost their credit and reputation are like merchants inevitably destined to ruin; for all men immediately call in their loyalty and respect from the first, as they do their money from the latter." ""Tis a strange age we've lived in and a lewd As e'er the son in all his travels view'd. * acters," fills the whole of the second volume of Thyer's "Remains," and which must evidently, from the care with which every page is written, have occupied much of Butler's time after the first two parts of Hudibras were off his hands, and have been destined by him for independent publication-consists of nothing else than a series of sketches, written with an unvarying acerbity and harshness hardly paralleled in our literature, of what Butler must have considered the typical forms and phases of English human nature in his time. We do not know how we can better give an idea of Butler's real character and temper than by copying out this little-known list of Butler's analysis, as it may be called, of contemporary English society, so far as he was acquainted with it, into its constituent particles. 66 characters" 1. A modern politician. 16. A small poet. 3. A republican. 4. A politician. 7. A modern statesman. 19. A melancholy man. 32. A mathematician. 35. A justice of peace. 38. A proselyte. 40. A quibbler. 41. A wooer. 42. An impudent man. 43. An imitator. 44. A time-server. 45. A prater. 77. An affected man. 85. A luxurious man. 88. An undeserving fa vorite. 89. A cuckold. 46. An hermetic philoso- 90. pher. 47. An alderman. 48. A disputant. 49. A sot. 50. An Atheist. 51. A juggler. 52. A sceptic. 53. A projector. 54. A complimenter. 55. A church-warden. 56. A romance-writer. 57. A cheat. 58. A libeller. 59. A tedious man. 61. A factious member. 70. A litigious man. 71. A pedant. 72. A hunter. 73. A humorist. A malicious man. 91. A squire of dames. 92. A knave. good many of them are taken from the opposite side of society and politics altogether; some are taken from the literary department, and some from the scientific department of English life in that day; and many are altogether general, and have reference to lasting forms of human weakness, imposture, crime, and folly. It was in the nature of Butler's satire, that, finding all to be equally censurable, it should express itself rather in representative portraits of classes, than in personalities. Occasionally, however, as in the character entiled "A Duke of Bucks," and in incidental allusions to Prynne and other sectaries, whom Butler seems to have particularly disliked, this rule is broken through; and in some of his posthumous scraps of verse, there is evidence that his satire could, when he liked, single out individual victims. Thus, among the scraps, we find a violent personal lampoon on 102. A superstitious man. Denham; a squib on Philip Nye's beard; 93. An anabaptist. 95. An hypocrite. 103. A drole. 104. An empiric. 105. An obstinate man. 74. A leader of a faction.119. A glutton. The fact that each and all of the characters in the above list are unsparing invectives, without one qualifying word in praise of any living thing or person, may arise in part from the circumstance, that Butler's literary forte was satire, and that he deliberately restricted himself, in writing them, to the mean and ugly side of things. But whoever reads the characters will see in their uniform and inexhaustible bitterness something more than this a positive dissatisfaction of Butler's own mind with all that he saw, and a habit of finding nothing in the world that was not, if well looked into, evil and intolerable. Were the "characters" classified, it would be found that only a certain proportion of them are taken from the Puritan or Nonconformist side of things. A two mock panegyrics on Dryden's brotherin-law, the Honorable Edward Howard, on the occasion of a heroic drama which he had written, and which Butler, and most other critics, thought to be bad stuff; and finally, which was boldest of all, a parody of Dryden's own dramatic diction, in the form of a dialogue between two cats caterwauling in heroics. In fact, with the whole literary world of the time, as with the whole social world, Butler seems to have been in his heart at fued. Writers, critics, readers-all were bad; and so far as he thought it necessary to express his opinion of them, it was always in censure. Above all (and the fact must out) the for an unsual share of Butler's ridicule. Royal Society and the Virtuosi came in One or two of them, such as Boyle and Dr. Charlton, he attacks by name; and among his posthumous poems and papers there are three or four expressly satirizing the Society's weekly meetings and their mathematical and physical pursuits. "These were their learned speculations, To strew the "Elixir" in a bath Men are often modest and amiable in their personal demeanor who are fierce and aggressive in their writings; but with all allowance on this score, it is too evident that a man who could not let even the venerable Royal Society alone, must have had a crabbed and ill-conditioned element in him, not likely to further his interests in life. Probably the consciousness of this, developed at last into the habitual sourness of a disappointed man, was the secret of Butler's solitary way of living. He was emphatically, as Dr. Johnson would have said, not a "clubbable" man. "It is both the wisest and safest way," is one of the maxims found in his commonplace-book, "to keep at a convenient distance from all men; for when men converse too closely, they commonly, like those that meet in crowds, offend one another." Poor man, he seems at last to overtasked his own maxim, and to have kept at an inconvenient distance from all men. There is good evidence that in his last days he was literally in want. If he had made any money by his Hudibras, it was too little to stand him in stead of everything else; and he was too slow and shiftless, and perhaps too proud, a writer to make much of such opportunities as writing for periodicals and the like then afforded. He appears, in his necessity, to have thought of making a desperate attempt at a drama, then the species of literature which brought the best returns; and part of a tragedy, entitled "Nero," was found among his papers. But his true resource was Mr. Longueville. "Mr. Longueville," says Roger North, in his Life of Lord Guildford, was the last patron and friend that poor old Butler, the author of Hudibras, had, and, in his old age, he supported him, otherwise he might have been literally starved." What was the exact measure of Mr. Longueville's kindness is unknown-one always fancies that wealthy lairds and lawyers might do so very much with their purses in such cases. At all events, after a hard winter passed in his lodging in Rose Street, during which he was so ill that he never went 66 He out, and only Mr. Longueville's charity stood between him and absolute destitution, the poet, some time in 1680, caught a fever, or a consumption, which carried him off on the 25th of September, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. Mr. Longueville, to whom Butler had bequeathed his papers, acted as his executor. He made exertions to get up a subscription for burying his deceased friend in Westminster Abbey; but though the news of Butler's death in such melancholy circumstances seems to have caused a good deal of talk in town, and became the subject of strong comment afterwards by Dryden, Oldham, and others, the interest felt at the moment was not sufficient to carry Mr. Longueville's project. Accordingly, the poet's remains were interred, at Mr. Longueville's own expense, in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Covent Garden. He seems to have wished to be buried there. was buried, says Aubrey, the 27th of September, "according to his own appointment, in the churchyard of Covent Garden, in the north part, next the church, at the east end. His feet touch the wall. His grave two yards distant from the pilaster of the dore, by his desire six foot deepe. About twenty-five of his old acquaintance at his funeral, I myself being one." It is worth while, reader, should you ever be passing through Covent Garden, to stand by the railing of the now somewhat dingy churchyard, on the west side, a little away from where the market gardeners chaffer among their baskets and cabbage leaves, and to indentify, by Aubrey's description, the spot where the author of Hudibras is buried. It was, one may say, the centre of his domain of exercise and observation while he was alive. It is very near Rose Street, and round it lie the Strand, Fleet Street, Gerard Street, Drury Lane, and all the other classic old streets in which the literary men of that time (the Shaksperes and Jonsons of a former age had kept more to the south and east) had their haunts and dwellings, and which still, in later generations, though the tendency continued to be north and westward, served for the Addisons, and Johnsons, and Goldsmiths, to live and walk in. Ah, London! thou perpetual home of a shifting multitude, how, as into a vast sieve, the generations keep descending amid thy brick-built streets and and alleys, only to trickle away and disappear beneath into thy catacombs and cemeteries. A while thou holdest us; but the reservoir is filling over us with the perpetual rain, and we, too, are sinking, sinking, towards the ancient dead! metaphysical, or what you will-revel in the high, feel at home in it, and prefer it. It is from the first class more particularly that satirists are born; except when, as sometimes happens, a man of the other class steps out, clothed in the very thunders of his high contemplations, to satirize the satirists themselves, and prove to them the celestial, if only by its thunder. Milton himself was a satirist, when he chose, in this sense; Butler was a satirist in the other. His philosophy of human nature Butler, says Aubrey, was "of middle stature, strong sett, high-colored, with a head of sorrel hair, a severe and sound judgment; a good fellow," Again, from another source, "he was of a leoninecolored hair, sanguine, choleric, middlesized, strong; a boon and witty companion, especially among the company he knew well." As regards his good fellow-was that of the lowest schools; and there ship, we have already seen, on other evidence, how far that is to be understood; one is glad, however, to know, by way of curiosity, that his complexion and hair were so nearly of Cromwell's own color. The form of his face in the portraits is heavy and sullen. is no maxim that he repeats more frequently, and with a more bitter emphasis, both in verse and in prose, than that interest alone governs the world, and that those who proceed on any other supposition are fools. Thus: "All the business of the world is but diversion, and all the happiness in it that mankind is capa ble of, anything that will keep it from reflecting upon the misery, vanity, and nonsense of it, and ing of it, is as wise and happy as the best man in whoever can by any trick keep himself from thinkit. "The chiefest art of government is to convert the ignorance, folly, and madness of mankind, as much as may be to their own good; which can never be done by telling them truth and reason, or using any direct means, but by little tricks and devices (as they cure madmen) that work upon their hopes and fears, to which their ignorance naturally inclines them." .-Thoughts on various subjects. Our impression of Butler's general character as a man-on which his character as a writer may be regarded as a superstructure-has, we trust, already been conveyed. He seems to have been a man of grave, correct, and somewhat morose nature, decidedly of that order of mind which, by way of philosophic distinction, may be called the descendental; a man, the basis of whose intellectual being was strong, solid, but very hard and very earthly sense. One might compare him with Swift, who, however, had a more savage and demoniac element in him, which led him farther, and brought him in contact at least with the infernal side of of the sceptical or descendental philosophy; These are precisely the cardinal notions that which transcends the visible. On and the constitutional tenacity with which the whole, one can best realize Butler's Butler held to them, explains his whole exact character, by regarding him as, more career and character. How could such a peculiarly than any other man of his age, man be other than an antagonist of Puritanthe polar opposite to Milton-Milton the ism, the very essence of which consisted in transcendental man of his time, and the noblest literary representative and defen- of God, through His saints, on earth? a belief in the possibility of an actual reign der of that class of sentiments and opion- "What are all histories and records of acions which Butler derided. This contrast, tions in former times," said Cromwell, or polarity in the intellectual world, is dis-"but a revelation of God that He hath decernible in all ages, though it is not always stroyed, and tumbled down, and trampled instanced in so remarkable a manner. under foot whatever He hath not planted?" There are always men who can 66 stand no nonsense," who take their footing on what tory from the Puritan point of view with Compare this magnificent definition of histhey call the hard fact of things, who Butler's comic one, from his, and say have an innate turn for undervaluing what- whether it was possible for the two men ever is high, extreme, and unusual, either in thought or action-high metaphysics, high not to oppose each other: art, high poetry, high Calvinism, high anything. On the other hand, there are always men who, from some constitutional peculiarity, call it ideality, heart, enthusiasm, artistic sense, tendency to the "What else does history use to tell us, But tales of subjects being rebell'ous ?" But that same disbelief of Butler in all that was high or divine in human nature |