during which he might actually, as a
young man, have welcomed into print the
last literary performances of such surviving
veterans of the Elizabethan age as Ben
Jonson, Donne, Drayton, Chapman, and
Ford; but though other young English-
men of this time, such as Waller, Davenant,
Suckling, Milton, Denham, and Cowley,
made good their entrance into literature
before these giants of the elder generation
had finally quitted the stage, Butler saw
them vanish without so much as attempt-
ing to put himself in any other relation to
them than that of an ordinary reader.
Then came the period of the Civil Wars
and the Commonwealth, coinciding with
all that portion of Butler's life which
elapsed between his twenty-ninth and his
forty-ninth year. This period, being one of
turmoil and political excitement, as well as
of Puritan government, was not so favorable
to the purer kinds of literary production,
i.e., to imaginative and calm speculative or
historical literature, as the age which it
had succeeded. Still it had an ample lit-
erature, peculiar to itself—a literature, at
least, of satire and incessant theological
and political discussion; and, in one way
or another, some at home and others in
exile, such writers as Hobbes, Herrick,
Izaak Walton, and the dramatist Shirley,
all of whom had been past middle age be-
fore the civil wars began, and such young
writers as Waller, Davenant, Suckling,
Milton, Denham, and Cowley, who, as has
just been mentioned, had taken their de-
gree in literature before the same revolu-
tionary outburst, continued, during the
era of Puritan ascendency, to stand before
the world as active men of letters. Shir-
ley, poor fellow, his source of livelihood
cut off by the suppression of the stage in
1642, had gone into the country to teach
a school and live on his reputation as an
ex-dramatist; Herrick, ejected from his
charge in Devonshire, as not being the
kind of clergyman that a Puritan govern-
ment could tolerate, was probably hum-
ming over his old songs and fancies and
writing new ones to amuse his leisure in
some cottage near his old parish; Hobbes
was abroad, teaching mathematics to
Charles II. in his exile, and writing his
"Leviathan" and other works, which he
afterwards came over to England to pub-
lish; Waller, Davenant, Denham, and
Cowley also lived abroad as royalist exiles,
till towards the end of Cromwell's Protec-
torate, when they were permitted to re-ed to challenge notice.
turn and write as much as they chose,
and when Waller, at least, thought it wise
to make his peace with Cromwell and be-
come one of his panegyrists; Suckling had
died almost at the beginning of his royal
master's troubles; Izaak Walton, having
quitted his cloth-shop, in Chancery Lane,
in 1644, was dividing his time between
fishing, the preparation of his book on
that art, and pious recollections of Donne,
Hooker, Wotton, and other good men
whom he had known before the king's head
had been cut off; and, lastly, Milton, the
true literary representative of Puritanism
and the Commonwealth, though he had
forsaken for the time the softer muse of
his youth, was still conspicuously at work,
shaking the very soul of Royalism and
Prelacy, by his noble prose treatises in de-
fence of the Revolution and its leaders.
Nay, there were others, not mentioned in
the above list, whose literary career began,
or was continued, during the stormy pe-
riod of the Commonwealth. The manhood
of the great Jeremy Taylor corresponds
with this period, which he did not long
survive; Richard Baxter, and other non-
conforming divines, became famous during
it; the quaint Fuller then penned many of
his writings; the philosophic Sir Thomas
Browne, calm as a mollusc in the midst of
the social perturbations, was pursuing his
fantastic speculations in his study at Nor-
wich; the vagabond trooper Cleveland,
now abroad with his Royalist associates,
and now risking his neck in England, was
inditing his racketty squibs against the
Roundheads, with especial reference to
that grand topic of fun with all the satir-
ists of his party, Oliver's copper nose; and
Milton's friend, honest Andrew Marvell,
had at least given evidence to those who
knew him of his capacity of writing well
on the other side. Yet, in the midst of all
this cross-fire of writings from Royalists
and Puritans, from poets and philosophers,
from Englishmen at home and Englishmen
in their exile in France and Holland, we
hear not a word of any publication, pro or
con, in verse or in prose, bearing the name
of Samuel Butler. It was not till after the
Restoration that-amid the general gath-
ering of the old wits from their haunts
around the throne of Charles II. and the
sudden crop of new and younger wits
evoked by the license afforded to dramatic
riot and all that had hitherto been repress-
ed-the face or the name of Butler emerg-