The Age of Dryden. Richard Garnett
of the monarchy, entitled Mola Asinaria, appeared from his pen. The service was recompensed by the appointment of secretary to the Earl of Carbury, Lord President of Wales, who made him steward of Ludlow Castle, where Comus had been performed nearly thirty years before. He resigned this charge upon contracting what seemed a wealthy marriage, but the lady’s money was lost, and, notwithstanding the great literary success Hudibras, the remainder of the author’s life was spent in poverty. The first part of Hudibras, stated in the title to have been written during the Civil War, and if so at least fifteen years old, was published in 1663. Its success was instantaneous, though neither the Puritans nor Mr. Pepys could quite see the joke. The merit of the performance, however, was fully apparent to a better and more influential judge, the king, who encouraged the author by giving numerous copies away, though history does not say at whose expense. But this was all he gave, and the poet who had rendered such essential service to the royalist cause by his writings was as completely neglected by the Court as if he had been John Milton. It is indeed said that he was in receipt of a pension of £100 at his death; but this seems contradicted by the letter, already quoted, of Dryden to the Lord High Treasurer within two years after Butler’s death, where he says: ‘’Tis enough for one age to have neglected Mr. Cowley and starved Mr. Butler.’5 Oldham’s lines, written at the same time, are still more emphatic:
‘On Butler who can think without just rage,
The glory and the scandal of the age?
Fair stood his hopes when first he came to town,
Met everywhere with welcomes of renown,
Courted and loved by all, with wonder read,
And promises of princely favour fed;
But what reward for all had he at last,
After a life of dull expectance passed?
The wretch at summing up his misspent days
Found nothing left but poverty and praise;
Of all his gains by verse he could not save
Enough to purchase flannel and a grave;
Reduced to want, he in due time fell sick,
Was fain to die, and be interred on tick;
And well might bless the fever that was sent
To rid him hence, and his worse fate prevent.’
These spirited verses are certainly exaggerated. Butler, though, as his biographer says, ‘personally known to few,’ partook on the same authority of the munificence of Dorset, and dying on September 25th, 1680, was buried on September 27th in the churchyard of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, at the expense of another friend, William Longueville, bencher of the Inner Temple, who had previously endeavoured to obtain his interment in Westminster Abbey, where, Atterbury being dean, a tardy monument was erected to him in 1721 by Alderman Barber. Very little is known of the latter years of his life, except that he lived in Rose Street, Covent Garden, and that he suffered much from the gout. He had published a second part of Hudibras in 1664, and a third in 1678, containing many allusions to events much later than the Civil War. He bequeathed his posthumous papers to Longueville, by whom they were carefully preserved, and a large portion eventually came to be published in 1759. They will be treated of in another place. Not much is known of Butler’s personal character and habits. He must evidently have been a man of extensive reading, and versed in several languages and literatures. It seems natural to attribute the neglect of so popular an author to some infirmity in his own temper, but the little testimony we have makes the other way. Wood describes him as ‘a boon and witty companion;’ and Aubrey says, ‘A severe and sound judgment, a good fellow.’ It must be remembered that he was forty-eight at the Restoration, and had spent almost all his life in the country; we shall also find reason to believe that he was neither enough of a churchman nor enough of a loyalist to be entirely agreeable to his own party.
The defect in Hudibras pointed out by Dr. Johnson, the want of logical sequence in the action, undoubtedly exists, but is almost inherent in the conception of such a performance. A more serious drawback, the disproportion between the hero’s deeds and his words, probably arises from the poem having been written at different periods of the author’s life. When he began to write his invention was lively and vigorous, but it naturally flagged after middle age, although his wit remained unimpaired. In the first and part of the second canto disquisition and adventure are so evenly blended that each supports the other; in the latter part of the poem the burden falls almost entirely upon the former. Hence the picturesque and cleverly varied incident of the bear-baiting, with the varied characters it brings upon the scene, will always be the favourite passage of the poem, unless an exception be made for the portraits of Hudibras and Ralpho. There is, however, considerable inconsistency in the character of Hudibras. He is represented as a fool, yet half the good things of the book are, from sheer necessity, put into his mouth. We are to suppose him a coward, yet he takes and deals cuffs and bangs in the spirit of a pugilist; and his attack upon the seven champions of bear-baiting, one of them an Amazon, is so far from cowardice, that it more resembles temerity. The more odious traits of his character hardly seem properly to belong to it; and in fact Butler probably commenced his poem without too curiously considering how he was to conduct it, or rather where it was to conduct him, and scribbled away in the spirit of his own maxim —
‘One for sense, and one for rhyme,
Is quite sufficient at one time’ —
trusting to the humour ever springing up under his pen to redeem his verse from the imputation of doggrel. This it certainly did; for although Hudibras as a whole is rambling, ill-compacted, and wordy, the terseness of many individual passages is as remarkable as their humour:
‘A tool
That knaves do work with, called a fool.’
‘Cerberus himself pronounce
A leash of languages at once.’
‘Hudibras wore but one spur,
As wisely knowing, could he stir
To active trot one side of ’s horse
The other would not hang.’
‘For as on land there is no beast,
But in some fish at sea’s exprest;
So in the wicked there’s no vice
Of which the saints have not a spice.’
‘Quoth she, There are no bargains driven,
Nor marriages clapped up in heaven,
And that’s the reason, as some guess,
There is no heaven in marriages.’
Butler’s Hudibras may perhaps be best defined as a metrical parody upon Don Quixote, with a spice of allusion to the Faerie Queene, in which the nobility and pathos of the originals are designedly obliterated, and the humour exaggerated into farce to suit the author’s polemic purpose. His design is to kill Presbyterianism and Independency by ridicule, and he is consequently compelled to shut his eyes to everything in them except their occasional tendency to baseness, and their perpetual liability to cant. This is the constant Nemesis of the satirist; but Butler is even more of a caricaturist than the situation called for. The endurance of his poem to our own times, however, is sufficient proof that, although a caricature, it was not a libel, and amid the enthusiastic reaction of the Restoration it may well have passed for a fair portrait. The machinery is closely modelled upon Don Quixote. Presbyterianism is incarnated in the doughty justice of the peace, Sir Hudibras; Independency and new light sectarianism in general in his squire, Ralpho; and the two sally forth in quest of adventure quite in the style of Don Quixote and Sancho, except that the Don’s great aim is to deliver damsels, and Hudibras’s to imprison them. Though the scene appears to be laid in the west of England, there is no reason to doubt the tradition that the prototype of Hudibras’s satire was Butler’s master, the Bedfordshire magistrate, Sir Samuel Luke, who is evidently alluded to where
Mr. Churton Collins, by a clerical error, prints