Of course it cannot be that Butler was aright, was young Butler, and not the positively idle with his pen all this time. kind of infant for any Muse to dandle. He was not heard of as a writer prior to "When but a boy," says Aubrey, "he 1662; but the man who then came forth would make observations and reflections with such a poem as the first part of Hudi- on everything one said or did, and cen bras must have had a good deal of quiet sure it to be either well or ill;" and, wherpractice beforehand in the art of putting ever Aubrey got his information, it has a his thoughts on paper. It becomes of singular smack of truth about it. Not a some importance, therefore, to find out, if flowing-haired poetic child of the Cowley possible, at what point in that obscure pe- stamp at all, mildly stealing away from riod in Butler's life which elapsed before the his companions into the fields to read, but Restoration the literary impulse first seized a decidedly hard-headed if not stubbyhim, what was the precise nature of that haired boy, keeping uncomfortably near impulse, and what were the circumstances to people when they were talking, and which retarded so long the public exhibi-"censuring things to be either well or ill;" tion of his talent. For this purpose let us such, even without Aubrey's hint, but glance at the little that is known of this merely on the principle of the boy being portion of his life. father to the man, should we have conButler was the son of a substantial far-ceived young Butler to have been in his mer in Worcestershire. He received a school-days. If he did go to college he very good school education at the Cathe-doubtless made the most of his time there, dral school of Worcester, under a master and read books and acquired knowledge who had a considerable reputation in his day for turning out pupils who afterwards became distinguished. It is not certainly known whether he was sent to either of the Universities. There is a vague account of his having been at Cambridge, and there is a still more vague account of his having been at Oxford; but Mr. Bell is disposed, and we think justly, to believe that neither account is correct, and that Butler never received any university education. If he was at either of the Universities, however, we can well suppose that it was not then or there that he began to write verses. It is easy to see from the nature of his writings, after he did become a writer, that he never could have had anything about him of that overflowing productive disposition, that rich imitative instinct, which belongs to the young sons of Apollo, and which made his contemporaries, Milton and Cowley, poets even in their teens. Milton, a fond disciple at college of all that was best in classical as well modern poetry, was already himself a writer of sweet verse; and Cowley was but a flowing-haired child when, meeting with Spenser's "Faery Queene," the imitative impulse seized him, and he began to lisp in numbers:

"The Muses did young Cowley raise ;

They stole him from his nurse's arms,
Fed him with sacred love of praise,
And taught him all their charms."

assiduously, as would become a sensible farmer's son, receiving education at some expense to his family; but to Spenser's "Faery Queen," and all that class of influences, we suspect he would have presented a cuticle of greater resistance than either Milton or Cowley did. In short, if he was at the University, we can well believe that he left it without ever having perpetrated verse at all, or at least anything more than a few lines of such hard downright doggrel as would not matter much one way or another. He may, however, have written good sound prose, of a quality quite sufficient for his purposes as a scholar.

According to the very scanty notices that remain, that period of Butler's life which extends from his early youth till after the Restoration, is to be considered as dividing itself into three parts. First of all, from his early youth onwards, for an uncertain number of years, but probably till about 1639, when he would be twenty-seven years of age, we find him acting as clerk in the service of Thomas Jeffries, of Earl's Croombe, a flourishing Justice of Peace in his native county of Worcestershire. While in this service, he is said to have had some thoughts of turning painter; and, as late as the middle of last century, there were some portraits and other pictures at Earl's Croombe which were said to have been painted by Butler during his residence there. They do not seem to have been worth much; and,

A much tougher subject, if we guess though Butler kept up his taste for the

art in after-life so as to become acquainted this; and in other respects it accords with with Samuel Cooper, the English portrait- the facts. If Butler did enter this service painter of his day, his own practice in it in 1639, when he was in his twenty-eighth was probably never more than that of an year, he may have remained in it till 1651, amateur. There was more feasibility in the in which year the Countess died, leaving plan which he is said also to have enter- Selden her executor and part-heir; and tained about this time of becoming a law- still there would be ample time left for a yer, or at least a country attorney; and, third and different service which Butler is as evidence of some such intention, there said to have discharged before the Restois not only a tradition of his having en- ration-namely, that of secretary, or gentered himself at Gray's Inn, but also the eral man of business to Sir Samuel Luke fact of his having left behind him among of Cople Hoo, in the same county of Bedhis papers a syllabus of Coke upon Little- fordshire. Sir Samuel was one of the ton, drawn up in law French in his own leading Presbyterians of the county, and handwriting. Not even to the dignity of a Justice of Peace. He had been a Colan independent country attorney, however, onel in the Parliamentary army during was Butler to be promoted. From be- the Civil Wars, and Member in the Long ing law-clerk to the Worcestershire Jus- Parliament for Bedfordshire; and though tice of Peace, we find him-through what with others of the Presbyterian leaders, intermediate stages of amateur portrait- he had shrunk back from the extreme propainting, and law-studentship, is unknown ceedings of the Parliament about the time -transferred to a superior situation, as of the King's death, and had, in consesecretary, or the like, in the household of quence, been one of those members whom the Countess of Kent, at Wrest, in Bed- the army leaders and Independents "sefordshire. Here, besides leisure to amuse cluded" about this time from farther attenhimself with painting and music, he had dance in the House, he yet appears to the advantage of an excellent library, and of have retained his zeal in the general cause the conversation of the learned Selden,then of the Revolution, and to have been an steward of the Countess's estates, and, ac- active magistrate in Bedfordshire under cording to Aubrey's account, privately mar- Cromwell's government. The precise naried to her. It is this circumstance of Sel- ture of Butler's duties in his service canden's being domesticated at Wrest at the not be known; but if he entered it after time of Butler's service there that enables 1651, when the Civil Wars in England us to form a guess as to dates. Mr. Bell,find- were over, and the Commonwealth was ing that Selden spent the Parliamentary an established fact, they may very well recess of the year 1628 at the Earl of have been such as a secretary, though of Kent's seat in Wrest, employing himself Royalist connections and sentiments himin the preparation of his work on the self, might consistently enough discharge Arundel marbles, assigns that year as the for a Presbyterian master. As to the duprobable date of Butler's admission into ration of this service, however, we are tothe Countess's service. This supposition tally uninformed. We have assumed it to seems quite untenable. Butler would have begun in 1651, and it may have then have been only sixteen years of age, continued till 1660 or thereabouts-i. e., and there would be no room at all for his through the period of the first Rump, and prior service at Earl's Croombe, not to the Protectorships of Cromwell and his speak of his painting and other occupa- son Richard, down to the confusions of tions attributed to him while there. It the second Rump and Monk's intrigues seems more natural to suppose, as we have immediately antecedent to the King's redone, that he did not leave Earl's Croombe call. When the King had returned, it for Wrest till about the year 1639; in would be natural, amid the general change which year, as Mr. Bell himself informs us, of system, for Presbyterian knights and Selden, by the death of the Earl of Kent, county magistrates to sink into combecame permanently domesticated in the parative idleness and obscurity, and for household of the Countess at Wrest, and their secretaries, especially if of Royalist that on a more intimate footing than when connections, to look about for other situathe Earl had been alive. The fact that tions. Butler is always represented by his biographers as having entered the service of the Countess of Kent, seems to confirm

Such is the meagre outline, with which we must be content, of the first forty-eight years of Butler's life. It is possible, in

prose satire against the Puritans, till about the eve of the Restoration, when, being then in Sir Samuel Luke's service in the same county of Bedfordshire, or just about to quit that service, he found himself a sufficiently expert writer to wish to appear as such, and capable not only of throwing off political pamphlets suited for the time, but also of planning and preparing a burlesque poem of some length.

priety of Oliver's exchanging the title of Protector for that of King was a matter of general discussion. Butler, among others, had his notions on the subject, of which he relieved himself, for his own satisfaction, or probably for the amusement of those about him, as above. After the death of Cromwell, and amid the confusions of Richard's brief Protectorate and the second Rump, there was less reason for reserve in such expressions of opinion; and, This account, probable on external accordingly, during the year immediately grounds, corresponds with the impression preceding the Restoration, Butler's pen we have of Butler's character. Always a seems to have been somewhat busy. Be- shrewd, industrious, and reading man, with sides other scraps, there is one prose piece a quantity of grim crabbed satire in him, of some length, the composition of which which may have come out in his talk, he may be certainly attributed to the year was evidently, as we have already said, 1659-1660, though it remained unpub-not one of that class of writers who, like lished till afterwards. This piece consists of "Two Speeches made in the Rump-Parliament when it was restored by the Officers of the Army in the year 1659," the said speeches being mock-harangues, invented by Butler, and put, the one into the mouth of an old Presbyterian member of the House, who is indignant at all that has been done by the army during the last ten years; and the other into the mouth of an Independent, or Army-man, who hates the Presbyterians. The composition is one of some vigor; and the writer makes the two debaters abuse each other, very much as Hudibras and Ralph do in the poem, only in sober earnest, and so as to produce an impression unfavorable both to a continuance of military rule or Independency, and to a revival of mere Parliamentary government without a royal head. Had the pamphlet been published, it would really have done some service in the cause of the Restoration, while that question was being debated, and Monk's intentions were uncertain. It is evident, in short, that Butler took a great interest in that question; and it is possible that, though the composition just mentioned was not printed, he may about this time have contributed other pieces of a political tenor which did find their way into circulation.

Milton and Cowley, take naturally from their childhood to literary effort, as ducklings do to the water. He could always, we have no doubt, write excellent business-prose; but he may have been comparin-ness-prose; atively advanced in life before the idea occurred to him of breaking up this businessprose, and enriching it, and fining it, and putting all his wit, and force, and power of learned allusion into it, so as to fit it for the purposes of literature. Much more may it have required a distinct stimulus from without to put the idea into his head of rising above his prose altogether and becoming a poet. Such a stimulus he found at last in the unusual social and political incidents of his time acting on his long constitutional and acquired antipathy to the Puritans. It was antipathy to the Puritans that caused Butler in middle life, at a time when he was probably known by his Bedfordshire neighbors only as a hardheaded and somewhat crusty and eccentric man of business, to become an author and a poet. He was not the only man who was so affected. Denham, in a mockaddress, in the name of the poets of England, to the Long Parliament, declares that one effect of their proceedings had been to make the whole nation, including King Charles himself, poets. The drift of this lame conceit is, that the Parliament had made at least one of the incentives to poetry, namely poverty, general enough throughout the kingdom. In a somewhat different sense, Denham's conceit may be taken as true. If there was less of poetry proper in England in that age of social convulsion, there was more of that kind of poetry which consists in social and political allusion put into verse. Balked of

The result of this brief investigation is, that it was not till about the thirty-seventh year of Butler's age, and when, according to our chronology, he was in the service of the Countess of Kent, at her seat in Bedfordshire, that he began to use his pen for anything like a literary purpose, and that from that time he used it only sparingly, in occasional pieces of verse and of

any more effective way of giving vent to | Puritans in all their branches and denomitheir hatred of the Puritans, the Royalists took their revenge in abundance of satirical squibs and ballads. Just as now we sometimes see a shrewd middle-aged citizen, or country-squire, who never suspected himself of any literary tendency, suddenly moved by his interest in some controversy to write to the newspapers, or perhaps to pen a pamphlet, and by that one fatal act parting with his liberty for ever after, and selling himself, body and soul, to the printer's devil, so it was then. Rough old cavaliers, rather shaky in their syntax, furbished it up for the occasion, that they might have a slap at the Roundheads one way if they could not have it in another; and fellows who had never found ⚫ the legitimate source of poetical inspiration at twenty in their mistress's eyebrow, were inspired at last, at forty, by Oliver Cromwell's nose. If a sample is wanted, take the following, two scraps from a mountain of similar stuff:

"Cromwell wants neither wardrobe nor armor; his face is natural buff, and his skin may furnish him with a rusty coat-of-mail. You would think he had been christened in a lime-pit, and tanned alive; but his countenance still continues mangy. We cry out against superstition, and yet we worship a piece of wainscot, and idolize an unblanched almond. Certainly 'tis no human visage, but the emblem of a mandrake, one scarce handsome enough to have been the progeny of Hecuba, had she whelped him."-Pamphlet of the year 1649.

"Of all professions in the town,

The brewer's trade hath gained renown;
His liquor reaches up to the crown,-
Which nobody can deny.

"He scorneth all laws and martial stops,
But whips an army as round as tops,
And cuts off his foes as thick as hops,-
Which nobody can deny.

"He dives for riches down to the bottom,

And cries, My masters,' when he has got 'em,
Let every tub stand upon his own bottom,

Which nobody can deny.'
Song of 1651-1658.

It was certainly no arrogance in Butler, even if he had never written anything before, to think that he could do better than this. The main qualification-that of positive irreconcilable dislike to the Puritans, and their whole mode of thought, speech, and action-he had in perfection. No one can understand Butler who fails distinctly to conceive this. His antipathy to the

nations, from the most moderate Presby-
terian to the most fanatical sectary and
Fifth-monarchy man, was no assumed feel-
ing; it was an honest inborn aversion, an
absolute incapacity of finding anything in
that order of ideas or things with which
he could sympathize; a crabbed constitu-
tional disgust with it all as cant, humbug,
hypocrisy, and delusion. A man whose
habit it was to "censure things to be either
well or ill," there were probably very few
things that he would in any circumstances
have censured to be well; but there could
not by possibility have been an ensemble
of things more calculated to provoke his
perpetual ill-censure than that in the midst
of which he found himself. Like Swift, an
obstinately descendental man, or bigot for
the hard terrestrial sense of things, and
yet living in an age when transcendental-
ism had broken loose, and seemed to be
whirling heaven and earth together, he
must have plodded about Bedfordshire
with a kind of sneering conviction on his
face that very few besides himself still
knew it to be only Bedfordshire, and not
a county in some celestial kingdom. The
more he saw of the Puritans in his own
neighborhood, and the farther that party
advanced, throughout the nation at large,
from their first beginnings of zeal to their
last exhibitions of religious and political
enthusiasm, the more they became to him
an object of satire; and if, at Sir Samuel
Luke's or anywhere else, he was thrown
much among their chief men, so as to have
opportunities of observing them, he must
have 66
taken notes" rarely. Nor was it
strange that a man of his extraordinary
natural wit, and extensive familiarity as a
reader with all sorts of books-a painter,
too, and therefore akin to an author al-
ready-should think of doing as others
were doing around him, and putting down
some of his observations in black and
white. Beginning, therefore, perhaps,
with some such doggrel ballad against
Cromwell as that which we have quoted
as the first known production of his pen,
he went on, as we suppose, inditing scraps
of prose and verse for his own private grat-
ification, some of which, however, not
now to be traced, may have had a con-
traband circulation among the Royalists
during the period of Cromwell's govern-
ment.

In prose, Butler, once he had begun, could never have had any peculiar diffi