CHAPTER XII. THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION. 1. SAMUEL BUTLER: his life. 2. Subject and nature of Hudibras. § 3. Butler's miscellaneous writings. §4. JOHN DRYDEN: his life. §5. His dramas. 46. His poems. Absalom and Achitophel. The Medal. Mac-Flecknoe. $7. Religio Laici and the Hind and Panther. § 8. Odes. Translations of Juvenal and Virgil. §9. Fables. § 10. Dryden's prose works. § 11. JoпN BUNYAN: his life. § 12. His works. Grace abounding in the Chief of Sinners. §13. The Pilgrim's Progress. § 14. The Holy War. § 15. EDWARD HYDE, EARL OF CLARENDON. His History of the Great Rebellion. § 17. IZAAK WALTON. His Lives and Complete Angler. §18. MARQUESS OF HALIFAX. JOHN EVELYN. § 19. SAMUEL PEPYS. § 20. SIR ROGER L'ESTRANGE. § 1. If the greatest name among the Puritan and Republican party be that of Milton, the most illustrious literary representative of the Cavaliers is certainly SAMUEL BUTLER (1612-1680). However opposed in political opinions, and however different in the nature of their works, these two men have some points of resemblance, in the vastness of an almost universal erudition, and in the immense quantity of thought which is embodied in their writings. The life of Butler was melancholy; the great wit was incessantly persecuted by disappointment and distress; and he is said to have died in such indigence as to have been indebted for a grave to the pity of an admirer. He was born of respectable but not wealthy parentage in 1612, and began his education at Worcester Free School. Great obscurity rests upon the details of his career: thus there are contradictory traditions as to whether he studied at Oxford or at Cambridge, or even whether he enjoyed the advantages of a University training at all. In all probability the latter supposition is the truth, and lack of means deprived him of any lengthened opportunity of acquiring, at either University, any portion of that immense learning which his works prove him to have possessed. As a young man he performed the office of clerk to Jeffries, a country Justice of the Peace; and there is no doubt that he made himself acquainted with the details of English law procedure. He was afterwards most likely by the protection of Selden, who knew and admired his talents, and who is said to have employed him as an amanuensis preferred to the service of the Countess of Kent, in whose house Selden long resided, and to whom indeed he is said to have been secretly married. Here Butler enjoyed one of the few gleams of sunshine that cheered his unhappy lot; he possessed good opportunities for study in tranquil retirement, and he had the advantage of conversing with accomplished men. It is nearly certain that he was for some time in the service in the capacity of tutor or clerk — of Sir Samuel Luke, a wealthy and powerful county magnate, and who figured prominently in those trou - - bled times as a violent republican member of Parliament, and as one of Cromwell's provincial satraps, half military and half political. In the house of Luke, who was an ardent fanatic, Butler had the opportunity of accumulating those innumerable traits of bigotry and absurdity which he afterwards interwove into his great satire on the Puritans and Independents; and Luke himself, it seems almost indubitable, was the original of Butler's inimitable caricature of Hudibras, in which he embodies all that was odious, ridiculous, and vile in the politics and religion of the dominant party. His great work, the burlesque satire of Hudibras, was published in detached portions and at irregular intervals: the first part, containing the first three cantos, in 1663, the second part in the following year, and the third not until 1678. Though composed, in all probability, long before, the first instalment of this inimitable satire was obliged to await the Restoration to make its first appearance; for it was only that event, by inaugurating the triumphs of Butler's loyal opinions, that could have secured the author from serious danger. The poem instantly became the most popular book of the age; for it gratified at once the taste for the highest wit and ingenuity, and the vindictive triumph of the Royalists over their enemies and tyrants. Charles II., with all his vices, was a man who could appreciate wit and learning. He carried about Hudibras in his pocket, was incessantly quoting and admiring it, and Butler's poem became as fashionable at court as the not superior satire of Rabelais had been in a former age. Very little solid recompense, however, accrued to Butler for his work. He was named Secretary to Lord Carbury, and in that capacity held for some time the office of Steward of Ludlow Castle, where the Comus of Milton had been presented before the Earl of Bridgewater by his accomplished children; but soon after Butler lost this place. It is said that Clarendon, then Chancellor, and Buckingham, as well as the King, had intended to do something for the illustrious supporter of their cause; but that a sort of fatality combined with the usual ingratitude of that profligate court to leave Butler in his former poverty; and the great wit is reported to have died, in extreme poverty, in a miserable lodging in Rose Street, Covent Garden (1680). He was buried, at the expense of his friend and admirer, Longueville, in the churchyard of St. Paul's in that poor neighborhood. § 2. Butler's principal title to immortality is his burlesque poem of Hudibras, a satire upon the vices and absurdities of the fanatic or republican party, and particularly of the two dominant sects of the Presbyterians and Independents. It is indeed to the English Commonwealth Revolution what the satire Menippee is to the troubles and intrigues of the League. Its plan is perfectly original, though the leading idea may be in some measure referred to the Don Quixote of Cerrantes; but as the object of Butler was totally different from that of the immortal Spanish humorist, so the execution is so modified as to leave the English work all the glory of complete novelty. The aim of Cervantes was to make us laugh at the extravagances of his hero, but without losing our love and respect for his noble and heroic character; that of Butler was to render his personages as odious and contemptible as was compatible with the sentiment of the ludicrous. Don Quixote, though never ceasing to be laughable, is in the highest degree. amiable and respectable: indeed it is only the discordance between his lofty chivalric sentiments and the low and prosaic incidents which surround him, that makes him ridiculous at all. Transport him to the age of the Round Table, and he is worthy to ride by the side of Lancelot or Galahad. Butler's hero the combination of all that is ugly, cowardly, pedantic, selfish, and hypocritical — is on the very verge of being an object, not of ridicule, but of hatred and detestation; and hatred and detestation are tragic and not comic feelings. Butler has shown consummate skill in stopping short just where his aim required it. All comic writing, the object of which is to excite laughter, attains its effect by the principle of discordance or disharmony between its subject and treatment; for as harmony is a fundamental principle of the beautiful, so is discord a fundamental principle of the ludicrous: consequently comic representations, whether written, painted, or sculptured, naturally divide themselves into two categories, both attaining their end by the same principle, though exhibiting that principle in two different ways. In one we have a lofty and elevated subject intentionally treated in a low and prosaic manner; in the other a low and prosaic subject treated in a lofty and pompous manner; and in either case the contrast, or discord, between the subject and the treatment, being suddenly presented to the imagination, provokes that mysterious emotion which we call the sense of the ludicrous. In the former case is produced what we name Burlesque, in the second what we designate Mockheroic. The poem of Hudibras describes the adventures of a fanatic Justice of the Peace and his clerk, who sally forth to put a stop to the amusements of the common people, against which the Rump Parliament had in reality passed many violent and oppressive acts. Not only were the theatres suppressed, and all cheerful amusements proscribed, during that gloomy time, but the rougher pastimes of the lower classes, among which bear-baiting was one of the most favorite, were violently suppressed by authority. The celebrated story of Colonel Pride causing the bears to be shot by a file of soldiers furnished the enemies of the Puritan government with inexhaustible materials for epigram and caricature. Be it observed that these severe measures were in no degree prompted by any motive drawn from the brutal cruelty of the sport, but simply from a systematic hostility to everything that bore a semblance of gayety and amusement. Sir Hudibras, the hero of Butler, and who, as already remarked, is in all probability a caricature of Sir Samuel Luke, is described, both in his person and equipment, and in his moral and intellectual features, as a combination of pedantry, cowardice, ugliness, and hypocrisy, such as, for completeness, oddity of imagery, and richness of grotesque illustration, no comic writer, neither Lucian, nor Rabelais, nor Voltaire, nor Swift, has surpassed. He is the type or representative of the Presbyterian party. His clerk Ralph —the Sancho Pança of this odious Quixote is the satiric portrait of the sour, wrong-headed, but more enthusiastic Independent sect. The versification adopted by Butler, as well as the name of his hero, is drawn from the old Anglo-Norman Trouvère poets, and the Legends of the Round Table; and the baseness of the incidents, the minuteness of the details, and the long dialogues between the personages, form a parody the comic impression of which is heightened when we think of the stately incidents of which the poem is a burlesque. Sallying forth to stop the popular amusements, Sir Hudibras and his Squire encounter a procession of ragamuffins conducting a bear to the place of combat. They refuse to disperse at the summons of the knight, when a furious mock-heroic battle ensues, in which, after varying fortunes, Hudibras is victorious, and succeeds in incarcerating in the parish stocks the principal delinquents. Their comrades return to the charge, liberate them, and place in durance in their stead the Knight and Squire, who are in their turn liberated by a rich widow, to whom Sir Hudibras, purely from interested motives, is paying his court. Hudibras afterwards visits the lady, and receives a sound beating from her servants disguised as devils; and he afterwards consults a lawyer and an astrologer to obtain revenge and satisfaction. The merit, however, and the interest of this extraordinary poem by no means consist in its plot. Such incidents as are introduced are indeed described with extraordinary animation and a grotesque richness of invention; but there is a complete want of unity and connection of interest, and there cannot be traced any general combination of events into an intrigue, or leading to a catastrophe. A long interval elapsed between the publication of the first and last canto, and in that interval the politics of the day had undergone a complete change. Butler, whose main object was to satirize the follies and wickedness of the reigning party, was obliged to direct his shafts against quite other vices and totally different persons: thus in the last canto he describes the general breaking up of the Rump Parliament, and the events immediately preceding the Restoration. His poem in general, like the adventure of the Bear and Fiddle which it contains, "begins, and breaks off in the middle." But no reader probably ever regretted the irregular and undecided march of the story; for the pleasure given by Hudibras is quite independent of the gratification of that kind of curiosity which finds its aliment in a well-developed intrigue. The astonishing fertility of invention displayed in the descriptions both of things and persons, the analysis of character exhibited in the long and frequent dialogues (principally between Hudibras and Ralph), the vivid and animated painting of the incidents, and above all the immeasurable flood of witty and unexpected illustra tion which is poured forth throughout the whole poem these are the qualities which have made Butler one of the great classics of the English language. Wit is the power of tracing unexpected analo gies, whether of difference or resemblance; the faculty of bringing together ideas, apparently incongruous, but between which, when sc brought together, the ordinary mind, though itself totally incapable of bringing them into contact, at once perceives their relation; and this perception, suddenly excited, is accompanied by a flash of pleasure and surprise. From the juxtaposition of the two poles of the galvanic wire, each previously cold and inert, darts forth a lightning-like spark of heat and radiance. The reader, being made the conducting body of this magic flash of wit, feels for the moment all the pleasure of the discoverer of the hidden relation. This power of associating ideas and images apparently incongruous, no author ever possessed in so high a degree as Butler; his learning was portentous in its extent and variety: and he appears to have accumulated his vast stores, not only in the beaten tracks, but in the most obscure corners and out-of-the-way regions of books and sciences. The amount of thought as well as reading he displays is almost terrifying to the mind; and he surprises not only by the unexpected images supplied by his immense reading, but quite as often by what is suggested by his fertile and ever-working imagination. The effect of the whole is augmented by the easy, rattling, conversational tone of his language, in which the most colloquial, familiar, and even vulgar expressions are found side by side with the pedantic terms of art and learning. The metre, too, is singularly happy; the short octosyllable verse carries us on with unabating rapidity; and the perpetual recurrence of odd and fantastic rhymes, whose ingenuity is artfully concealed under an appearance of the most unstudied ease, produces a series of pleasant shocks that awaken and satisfy the attention. Butler is at once intensely concise and abundantly rich. His expressions, taken singly, have the pregnant brevity of proverbs; while the fertility of his illustrations is perpetually opening new vistas of comic and witty association. He is as suggestive in his manner of writing as Milton himself; but while our great epic poet fills the mind, by indirect allusion, with all images that are graceful, awful, or sublime, Butler brings to bear upon his satiric pictures an unbounded store of ideas drawn from the most recondite sources. Milton leads the reader's mind to wander through all the realms of nature, philosophy, and art; Butler brings the stores of his knowledge and reading to our door. It is this marvellous condensation in his style, combined with the quaintness of his rhymes, that have caused so many of But 'er's couplets to become proverbial sayings in common conversation, and to be frequently employed by people who perhaps do not know whence these sparkling fragments of wit and wisdom are derived. The contrast of characters in Hudibras and Ralph is of course far less dramatic than that between Don Quixote and his inimitable Squire; yet the delicacy and vivacity with which Butler has distinguished between two cognate varieties of pedantry and fanaticism are worthy of great admiration. The sophistries and rascally equivocations which abound in the long arguments between the Knight and his attendant are admirable. It is not to be expected that Butler, whose object was exclusively satirical, should have taken into consideration any of the nobler qualities of the fanatics |