Hypocrisy, and pretension, and bigotry belong to no one sect or faction. In Butler's own party were to be found men to whom the following passage was at least as appropriate as to any of his opponents :

"For rhetoric, he could not ope

His mouth but out there flew a trope;

And when he happened to break off
I' th' middle of his speech, or cough,
H' had hard words, ready to show why,
And tell what rules he did it by:
Else, when with greatest art he spoke,
You'd think he talked like other folk;
For all a rhetorician's rules

Teach nothing but to name his tools."

This want of veracity is conspicuous throughout Butler's work, and renders it a burlesque as well as a satire. It is pitched throughout in too low a key; and the exaggeration is so gross and so obvious that we are inclined to sympathize with the objects of it. A man in a pillory is contemptible only so long as his persecutors refrain from making a martyr of him.

His stores of

Another defect is Butler's discursiveness. learning were so vast that they supplied his ingenious fancy with material for the prodigal decoration of any point it touched upon; and when once his fancy was let loose, it ran away with him. He luxuriated in his own profuseness; he could not rest until he had said everything that could be said: and the thought never occurred to him that what did not weary himself might very probably weary his readers. Thus, he has to describe the breeches of his hero, and it takes him more than forty lines to do it in. At first the description is exquisitely comic, and we are delighted with the happy conceits which follow one another so quickly; but after a while the fun grows forced and tedious, and we begin to wonder

when the writer will make an end of it.* We see that he
is writing for his own entertainment, and not for ours :-
"His breeches were of ragged woollen,
And had been at the siege of Bullen;
To old King Harry so well known,
Some writers held they were his own;
Though they were lined with many a piece
Of ammunition, bread and cheese,
And fat black puddings, proper food
For warriors that delight in blood;
For, as we said, he always chose
To carry victual in his hose,
That often tempted rats and mice
The ammunition to surprise;
And when he put a hand but in

The one or t'other magazine,

They stoutly on defence on't stood,

And from the wounded foe drew blood."

Had the poet ceased here all would have been well, but he continues with merciless amplitude to pile conceit upon conceit, until we feel that Ben Jonson's criticism of Shakespeare would more justly be applied to our muchoffending author, "that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped: Sufflaminandus erat, as Augustus said of Halerius." He goes on at full gallop, thus:

"And till th' were stormed and beaten out,
Ne'er left the fortified redoubt;

And though knights-errant, as some think,
Of old, did neither eat nor drink,
Because when through deserts vast,
And regions desolate they passed,
When belly-timber above ground,
Or under, was not to be found,

Unless they grazed, there's not one word

Of their provision on record;

Which made some confidently write

They had no stomachs but to fight.

*The wildest of all criticisms is surely Prior's. He praises Butler for what Butler never understood:

"Yet he, consummate master, knew

When to recede and when pursue."

"Tis false for Arthur wore in hall
Round table like a farthingal ;

On which, with shirt pulled out behind,
And eke before, his good knights dined;
Though 'twas no table some suppose,
But a huge pair of round trunk-hose,
In which he carried as much meat

As he and all the knights could eat ;

When laying by their swords and truncheons,

They took their breakfasts on their nuncheons."

From the initial line,

There is scarcely any plot or definite action* in “ Hudibras," and the incidents are few; though some are diverting enough, such as the attack of the knight and his squire on the bear and the fiddle, and their imprisonment in the stocks. The want of continuity helps as much as the diffusiveness to make it wearisome. As it stands, the story extends in time over three days. "When civil dudgeon first grew high," it is clear that Butler intended its action to bear date with the Civil Wars; but, after two days and nights are completed, he suddenly passes, in the third part, to Oliver Cromwell's death, and then, in the last canto, turns again to his hero. The thin stream of narrative with which he begun has by this time disappeared. Even the original intention of the poem seems to have been changed, and the satire against the Puritans concludes with an attack on Charles II. and his mistresses. For these reasons "Hudibras" remains a poem which all admire and few read, and the few who read do so "by fits and starts," a continuous perusal of it being almost impossible.

Butler is one of the most allusive, because he is one of the most learned of writers. What Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" is in our prose literature," Hudibras" is

* Nash, however, distinguishes four principal actions, or episodes.-The victory of Hudibras over Cruodero-Trulla's victory over Hudibras-Hudibras' victory over Sidrophel-and the Widow's repulse of Hudibras.

in our poetical. To enjoy it thoroughly one needs a knowledge almost as wide and deep as its author's. "There is always an undercurrent of satiric allusion," says a critic, "beneath the main stream of his satire. The juggling of astrology, the besetting folly of alchymy, the transfusion of blood, the sympathetic medicines, the learned trifling of experimental philosophers, the knavery of fortune-tellers, and the folly of their dupes, the marvellous relations of travellers, the subtleties of the schooldivines, the freaks of fashion, the fantastic extravagancies of lovers, the affectations of piety, and the absurdities of romance, are interwoven with his subject, and soften down and relieve his dark delineation of fanatical violence and perfidy."

Of wise saws and modern instances "Hudibras" is full to overflowing. No writer has ever shown more readiness in compressing "the wisdom of the many" into a terse couplet or two, as easily remembered as a proverb or a popular apophthegm or a nursery rhyme. Many of his "good things" have become part and parcel of our daily discourse, and we speak Butler, as Molière's Jourdain spoke prose, without knowing it. His works are sufficiently accessible to render unnecessary on our part any attempt to exhibit by quotation their general characters; but of the felicity with which their witty author condensed a thought or an image into a sentence, and pointed it by a couple or so of felicitous rhymes, we shall make bold to furnish some illustrations.

Here is a graceful simile:

"True as the dial to the sun,

Although it be not shined upon."

We agree with Leigh Hunt that the following is as elegant as anything in Lovelace or Waller :

And like an anchorite, gives over

This world, for the heaven of a lover?"

There is an exceptional elevation (for Butler) in the following:

"Like Indian widows, gone to bed

In flaming curtains to the dead."

An "exquisite and never-to-be-sufficiently repeated -couplet " :

"Compound for sins they are inclin❜d to,

By damning those they have no mind to."
And now for some wise thoughts :-
"Doubtless the pleasure is as great
Of being cheated as to cheat;

As lookers-on feel most delight

That least perceive a juggler's sleight;

And still the less they understand,

The more they admire his sleight-of-hand."

"For what in worth is anything,

But so much money as 'twill bring."

"He that is valiant and dares fight,

Though drubbed can lose no honour by 't.
Honour's a lease for lives to come,

And cannot be extended from

The legal tenant: 'Tis a chattel

Not to be forfeited in battle.
If he that in the field is slain
Be in the bed of honour lain,
He that is beaten may be said
To lie in honour's truckle-bed.
For as we see the eclipsed sun
By mortals is more gazed upon
Than when, adorned with all his light,
He shines in serene sky most bright,

So valour in a low estate

Is most admired and wondered at."