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Straight without further information,

In hideous verse, he in a dismal tone,
Begins to exercise; as if I were

Possess'd; and sure the devil brought me there.
But I, who now imagin'd myself brought
To my last tryal, in a serious thought
Calmed the disorders of my youthful breast,

And to my martyrdom prepared rest,
Only this frail ambition did remain,
The last distemper of the sober brain,
That there had been some present to assure
The future ages how I did endure:
And how I, silent, turn'd my burning ear

Towards the verse; and when that could not hea',
Held him the other; and unchanged yet,

Ask'd him for more, and pray'd him to repeat;

Till the tyrant, weary to persecute,

Left off, and tried to allure me with his lute.

I, that perceiv'd now what his musick meant,
Ask'd civilly, if he had eat this Lent?

He answered, yes; with such, and such an ore;
For he has this of gen'rous, that alone
He never feeds; save only when he trys
With gristly tongue to dart the passing flies.
I ask'd if he eat flesh. And he, that was
So hungry, that tho' ready to say mass,
Would break his fast before, said he was sick,
And th' ordnance was only politick.
Nor was I longer to invite him: scant
Happy at once to make him Protestant,
And silent. Nothing now dinner stay'd,
But still he had himself a body made:

I mean till he were dress'd; for else so thin

He stands, as if he only fed had been

With consecrated wafers; and the host

Hath sure more flesh and blood than he car brav

This basso relièvo of a man,

Who as a camel tall, yet eas❜ly can

The needle's eye thread without any stitch,

His only impossible is to be rich ;—

• Seem.

Lest his too subtle body, growing rare,
Should leave his soul to wander in the air,
He therefore circumscribes himself in rhymes;
And swaddled in 's own papers seven times,
Wears a close jacket of poetic buff,

With which he doth his third dimension stuff.

Thus armèd underneath, he over all

Does make a primitive Sotana fall;

And above that yet casts an antique cloak,
Worn at the first council of Antioch ;
Which by the Jews long hid and disesteem'd,
HE HEARD OF BY TRADITION, and redeem'd.
But were he not in this black habit deck'd,
This half transparent man would soon reflect
Each color that he past by; and be seen,
As the camelion, yellow, blue, or green.

He dress'd, and ready to disfurnish now
His chamber (whose compactness did allow
No empty place for complimenting doubt,
But who came last is forc'd first to go out),
I met one on the stairs who made me stand,
Stopping the passage, and did him demand;
I answer'd, "He is here, sir; but you see
You cannot pass to him but thòrow me."
He thought himself affronted; and reply'd,
"I, whom the palace never was deny'd,

Will make the way here." I said, "Sir, you'll do

Me a great favor, for I seek to go."

1 Flecnoe, an English Priest at Rome.-Poor Flecnoe was the poetaster, after whom Dryden christened Shadwell," MacFlecnoe." See passages from the satire thus entitled in the present volume. The verses before us, which are written in the same spirit of exaggeration as the preceding, exhibit that strange ruggedness in the versification, which was intentional in the satirists of those days when they used the heroic measure, and which they took to be the representative of the satirical numbers of Horace or his predecessors. Flecnoe luckily appears to have rendered the most good-natured poets callous, by a corresponding insensibility to the hardest attacks.

BUTLER.

BORN, 1612-DIED, 1680.

WIN

BUTLER is the wittiest of English poets, and at the same time is one of the most learned, and what is more, one of the wisest. His Hudibras, though naturally the most popular of his works from its size, subject, and witty excess, was an accident of birth and party compared with his Miscellaneous Poems; yet both abound in thoughts as great and deep as the surface is sparkling; and his genius altogether, having the additional recommendation of verse, might have given him a fame greater than Rabelais, had his animal spirits been equal to the rest of his qualifica tions for a universalist. At the same time, though not abounding in poetic sensibility, he was not without it. He is author of the touching simile,

True as the dial to the sun,

Although it be not shin'd upon.

The following is as elegant as anything in Lovelace or Waller:

-What security's too strong

To guard that gentle heart from wrong,

That to its friend is glad to pass

Itself away, and all it has,

And like an anchorite, gives over

This world, for the heaven of a lover!

And this, if read with the seriousness and singleness of feeling that become it, is, I think, a comparison full of as much grandeu a cordiality,

Like Indian widows, gone to bed.
In flaming curtains to the dead.

You would sooner have looked for it in one of Marvel's poems, than in Hudibras.

Butler has little humor. His two heroes, Hudibras and Ralph, are not so much humorists as pedants. They are as little like their prototypes, Don Quixote and Sancho, as two dreary puppets are unlike excesses of humanity. They are not even consistent with their other prototypes, the Puritans, or with themselves, for they are dull fellows unaccountably gifted with the author's wit. In this respect, and as a narrative, the poem is a failure. Nobody ever thinks of the story, except to wonder at its inefficiency; or of Hudibras himself, except as described at his outset. He is nothing but a ludicrous figure. But considered as a banter issu. ing from the author's own lips, on the wrong side of Puritanism, and indeed on all the pedantic and hypocritical abuses of human reason, the whole production is a marvellous compound of wit, learning, and felicitous execution. The wit is pure and incessant; the learning as quaint and out-of-the-way as the subject; the very rhymes are echoing scourges, made of the peremptory and the incongruous. This is one of the reasons why the rhymes have been so much admired. They are laughable, not merely in themselves, but from the masterly will and violence with which they are made to correspond to the absurdities they lash. The most extraordinary license is assumed as a matter of course; the accentuation jerked out of its place with all the indifference and effrontery of a reason "sufficing unto itself." The poem is so peculiar in this respect, the laughing delight of the reader so well founded, and the passages so sure to be accompanied with a full measure of wit and knowledge, that I have retained its best rhymes throughout, and thus brought them together for the first time.

Butler, like the great wit of the opposite party, Marvel, was an honest man, fonder of his books than of worldly success, and superior to party itself in regard to final principles. He wrote a satire on the follies and vices of the court, which is most likely the reason why it is doubted whether he ever got anything by Hudibras; and he was so little prejudiced in favor of the scholar

ship he possessed, that he vindicated the born poet above the poet of books, and would not have Shakspeare tried by a Grecian standard.

DESCRIPTION OF HUDIBRAS AND HIS EQUIPMENTS

When civil dudgeon first grew high,

And men fell out they knew not why;
When hard words, jealousies, and fears,
Set folks together by the ears,

And made them fight, like mad or drunk,
For dame Religion, as for punk'

(Whose honesty they all durst swear for,
Though not a man of them knew wherefore);
When gospel-trumpeter, surrounded
With long-ear'd rout, to battle sounded;
And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,

Was beat with fist instead of a stick;
Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling,
And out he rode a colonelling.

A wight he was, whose very sight would
Entitle him Mirror of Knighthood,
That never bow'd his stubborn knee
To anything but chivalry,

Nor put up blow, but that which laid
Right Worshipful on shoulder-blade;
Chief of domestic knights and errant,
Either for chartel* or for warrant;

Great on the bench, great in the saddle,
That could as well bind o'er as swaddle;
Mighty he was at both of these,
And styl'd of war, as well as peace
(So some rats, of amphibious nature,
Are either for the land or water).
But here our authors make a doubt,
Whether he were more wise or stout:
Some hold the one, and some the other,
But, howsoe'er they make a pother,
The difference was so small, his brain

Outweigh'd his rage but half a grain;

· Chartel is a challenge to a duel.

Swaddle, to swathe or bind in clothes; hence,to beat or cudgel.

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