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to meet them; and now were these two men as 'twere in Heaven before they came at it, being swallowed up with the sight of Angels, and with hearing of their melodious notes. Here also they had the City itself in view, and they thought they heard all the Bells therein ring to welcome them thereto. But above all, the warm and joyful thoughts that they had about their own dwelling there, with such company, and that for ever and ever. Oh by what tongue or pen can their glorious joy be expressed! And thus they came up to the Gate.

Unhappily, the last sight in the Pilgrim's Progress shows us Ignorance being damned at the very gate of heaven while the door closes behind the complacent saints. Yet one may fairly reject as alien accretions those of Bunyan's beliefs which do not harmonise with the beauty of his nature. The second part of the allegory, dealing with the journey of Christian's wife and children to join him, is, like most sequels, much inferior to the first work.

These then are the Puritans of English literature in the age of Puritanism; and it is noteworthy that they all wrote after Puritanism had lost its ascendency. That ascendency had generated a very different work - the Hudibras of Samuel Butler, a man of taste and learning, who in youth won the praise of Selden, the famous scholar. Butler was still young when the civil war began, and was employed as secretary by one Sir Samuel Luke. How the secretary chafed in this position may be easily inferred from the long burlesque poem, which was published after the Restoration had made such a venture possible; for he lets us know that the hero Sir Hudibras resembles closely "a worthy Mameluke," whose name is left in blank, but there are not many names that rhyme to Mameluke.' Sir Hudibras and his squire Ralpho have their prototypes in Don Quixote and Sancho Panza ;

Butler was a deliberate imitator. But Cervantes shows us the foibles of a man whom he loves and honours; Butler's one aim is to heap contempt and ridicule on the defeated party, whose heel had once been on the neck of every cavalier. The scheme of the poem is of the simplest. Sir Hudibras sets out 'a-colonelling' on his galled jade; interrupts a bear-baiting, puts the crowd to rout, and with the help of his sturdier squire Ralpho (who stands for the Independents, as the knight for the Presbyterians), captures a lame fiddler and pounds him in the stocks. But the tide of war turns, and Hudibras himself, captured by the Amazonian Trulla, is petticoated and set in the fiddler's place. Thence he is only rescued by the wealthy widow to whom he pays an ignominious court, and the rest of the four parts are occupied with his amorous devices; for instance, a whole canto describes his recourse to Sidrophel, the Rosicrucian conjurer.

There is probably no book in the language so much quoted and so little read as Hudibras, Butler had infinite wit and ingenuity; he used the octosyllabic couplet with great point and endless fertility of rhyme; and in his own day he was read greedily. The disputations between Hudibras and Ralpho, caricaturing the worst traits of both parties among the Puritans, have now, however, lost their immediate interest; what survives is an assortment of stray witticisms, such as the familiar tag:

Ay me! what perils do environ

The man that meddles with cold iron.

Some things, however, are too good ever to be forgotten, notably this passage from the description of Sir Hudibras :

He could raise scruples dark and nice,

And after solve 'em in a trice;

As if Divinity had catched

The itch on purpose to be scratched;
Or, like a mountebank, did wound
And stab herself with doubts profound,
Only to show with how small pain
The sores of faith are cured again,
Although by woeful proof we find
They always leave a scar behind.

The best and most characteristic passage in the whole poem is certainly the savage account of Presbyterianism :

For his religion, it was fit

To match his learning and his wit.
'Twas Presbyterian, true blue,

For he was of that stubborn crew
Of errant saints whom all men grant
To be the true Church Militant.
Such as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun;
Decide all controversies by
Infallible artillery;

And prove their doctrine orthodox
With apostolic blows and knocks;
Call fire and sword and desolation
A godly, thorough Reformation,
Which always must be going on,
And still be doing, never done,
As if Religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended:
A sect whose chief devotion lies
In odd, perverse antipathies,
In falling out with that or this
And finding somewhat still amiss;
More peevish, cross, and splenetic
Than dog distract or monkey sick :
That with more care keep holyday
The wrong, than others the right way;
Compound for sins they are inclined to
By damning those they have no mind to.
Still so perverse and opposite

As if they worshipped God for spite.

One could easily multiply examples of Butler's wit. But it is sufficient here to note that he

belongs to the older school of English poets. His model is the Satyre Ménippée, written long before Malherbe had inaugurated by example, and Boileau fixed by his criticisms, the new canons of poetic style. Butler in his own way is as redundant as the Elizabethan dramatists, as affluent as Milton. His object is to accumulate rather than to refine, and there is hardly a passage in his writings which could not be strengthened by excisions, though the individual couplets are terse enough. He had neither forerunner nor successor; for though his metre was freely employed by Prior and Swift, these men were fully under the new influences, which began to show themselves in the work of Butler's contemporaries.

CHAPTER VIII

DRYDEN AND THE PROSE WRITERS OF THE RESTORATION

THE leading fact in European history during the seventeenth century is the growing and universal preponderance of France. With the Restoration there came to the throne a king, half-French by blood, more than half-French by training. The character of his court is sufficiently indicated by the fact that one of our principal documents for the study of it is the memoir of a Frenchman, the Count de Grammont, written in French by another witty courtier, the Irishman, Antony Hamilton. Probably at no other time could a British writer, writing on a British subject, have become, as Hamilton actually became, almost a classic of the French tongue. The natural reaction against Puritanic repression of theatres and similar amusements was headed by a group of men who took Molière for their model, and produced within a few years a body of prose comedies so unlike anything that went before or came after them in English literature that we may be dispensed from treating them in this book. A knowledge of their work is the less indispensable to an understanding

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