28 Samuel Butler. Nov. his of Puritan ascendency, to stand before the cross-fire of writings from Royalists and world as active men of letters. Shirley, Puritans, from poets and philosophers, from poor fellow, his source of livelihood cut off Englishmen at home and Englishmen in by the suppression of the stage in 1642, had their exile in France and Holland, we hear gone into the country to teach a school and not a word of any publication, pro or con, in live on his reputation as an ex-dramatist; verse or in prose, bearing the name of Herrick, ejected from his charge in Devon- Samuel Butler. It was not till after the shire, as not being the kind of clergyman Restoration that--amid the general gatherthat a Puritan government could tolerate, ing of the old wits from their haunts around was probably humming over his old songs the throne of Charles II. and the sudden and fancies and writing new ones to amuse crop of new and younger wits evoked his leisure in some cottage near his old by the license afforded to dramatic riot and parish; Hobbes was abroad, teaching mathe- all that had hitherto been repressed-the matics to Charles II. in his exile, and writing face or the name of Butler emerged to chalOf course it cannot be that Butler was his "Leviathan" and other works, which he lenge notice. afterwards came over to England to publish; Waller, Davenant, Denham, and Cowley, positively idle with his pen all this time. also lived abroad as royalist exiles, till to- He was not heard of as a writer prior to wards the end of Cromwell's Protectorate, 1662; but the man who then came forth when they were permitted to return and with such a poem as the first part of Hudiwrite as much as they chose, and when bras must have had a good deal of quiet Waller, at least, thought it wise to make practice beforehand in the art of putting his with Cromwell and become one thoughts on paper. It becomes of some peace of his panegyrists; Suckling had died almost importance, therefore, to find out, if possible, at the beginning of his royal master's trou- at what point in that obscure period in Butbles; Izaak Walton, having quitted his cloth- ler's life which elapsed before the Restorashop, in Chancery Lane, in 1644, was divid- tion the literary impulse first seized him, ing his time between fishing, the preparation what was the precise nature of that impulse, of his book on that art, and pious recollec- and what were the circumstances which retions of Donne, Hooker, Wotton, and other tarded so long the public exhibition of his good men whom he had known before the talent. For this purpose let us glance at king's head had been cut off; and, lastly, the little that is known of this portion of Butler was the son of a substantial farmer Milton, the true literary representative of his life. He received a very Puritanism and the Commonwealth, though he had forsaken for the time the softer muse in Worcestershire. of his youth, was still conspicuously at work, good school education at the Cathedral school shaking the very soul of Royalism and Pre- of Worcester, under a master who had a lacy, by his noble prose treatises in defence considerable reputation in his day for turnof the Revolution and its leaders. Nay, ing out pupils who afterwards became disthere were others, not mentioned in the tinguished. It is not certainly known wheabove list, whose literary career began, or ther he was sent to either of the universities. was continued, during the stormy period of There is a vague account of his having been The manhood of the at Cambridge, and there is a still more vague the Commonwealth. great Jeremy Taylor corresponds with this account of his having been at Oxford; but period, which he did not long survive; Rich- Mr. Bell is disposed, and we think justly, to ard Baxter, and other non-conforming di- believe that neither account is correct, and vines, became famous during it; the quaint that Butler never received any university Fuller then penned many of his writings; education. If he was at either of the Uni the philosophic Sir Thomas Browne, calm as versities, however, we can well suppose It is easy to see, from the a mollusc in the midst of the social pertur- it was not then or there that he began to bations, was pursuing his fantastic specula- write verses. tions in his study at Norwich; the vagabond nature of his writings, after he did become trooper Cleveland, now abroad with his a writer, that he never could have had any. Royalist associates, and now risking his neck thing about him of that overflowing product in England, was inditing his racketty squibs ive disposition, that rich imitative instinct, against the Roundheads, with especial refer- which belongs to the young sons of Apollo, ence to that grand topic of fun with all the and which made his contemporaries, Milton satirists of his party, Oliver's copper nose; and Cowley, poets even in their teens. Mil and Milton's friend, honest Andrew Marvell, ton, a fond disciple at college of all that was had at least given evidence to those who best in classical as well as in modern poetry, was already himself a writer of sweet verse; knew him of his capacity of writing well on the other side. Yet, in the midst of all this and Cowley was but a flowing-haired child that when, meeting with Spenser's "Faery | Croombe which were said to have been Queene," the imitative impulse seized him, and he began to lisp in numbers,— "The Muses did young Cowley raise; They stole him from his nurse's arms, Fed him with sacred love of praise, And taught him all their charms." painted by Butler during his residence. there. They do not seem to have been worth much; and, though Butler kept up his taste for the art in after-life so as to become acquainted with Samuel Cooper, the first English portrait-painter of his day, his own practice in it was probably never more than that of an amateur. There was more A much tougher subject, if we guess feasibility in the plan which he is said also aright, was young Butler, and not the kind to have entertained about this time of of infant for any Muse to dandle. "When becoming a lawyer, or at least a country but a boy," says Aubrey, "he would make attorney; and, as evidence of some such observations and reflections on everything intention, there is not only a tradition of one said or did, and censure it to be either his having entered himself at Gray's Inn, well or ill;" and, wherever Aubrey got his but also the fact of his having left behind information, it has a singular smack of truth him among his papers a syllabus of Coke about it. Not a flowing-haired poetic child upon Littleton, drawn up in law French in of the Cowley stamp at all, mildly stealing his own handwriting. Not even to the digaway from his companions into the fields to nity of an independent country attorney, read, but a decidedly hard-headed if not however, was Butler to be promoted. From stubby-haired boy, keeping uncomfortably being law-clerk to the Worcestershire Justnear to people when they were talking, and ice of Peace, we find him-through what "censuring things to be either well or ill;" intermediate stages of amateur portraitsuch, even without Aubrey's hint, but painting, and law-studentship, is unknownmerely on the principle of the boy being transferred to a superior situation, as secrefather to the man, should we have conceived tary, or the like, in the household of the young Butler to have been in his school- Countess of Kent, at Wrest, in Bedforddays. If he did go to college he doubtless shire. Here, besides leisure to amuse himmade the most of his time there, and read books and acquired knowledge assiduously, as would become a sensible farmer's son, receiving education at some expense to his family; but to Spenser's "Faery Queene," and all that class of influences, we suspect he would have presented a cuticle of greater resistance than either Milton or Cowley did. In short, if he was at the University, we can well believe that he left it without ever having perpetrated verse at all, or at least anything more than a few lines of such hard downright doggrel as would not the preparation of his work on the Arundel matter much one way or another. He may, however, have written good sound prose, of a quality quite sufficient for his purposes as a scholar. self with painting and music, he had the advantage of an excellent library, and of the conversation of the learned Selden, then steward of the Countess's estates, and, according to Aubrey's account, privately married to her. It is this circumstance of Selden's being domesticated at Wrest at the time of Butler's service there that enables us to form a guess as to dates. Mr. Bell, finding that Selden spent the Parliamentary recess of the year 1628 at the Earl of Kent's seat in Wrest, employing himself in marbles, assigns that year as the probable date of Butler's admission into the Countess's service. This supposition seems quite untenable. Butler would then have been only According to the very scanty notices that sixteen years of age, and there would be no remain, that period of Butler's life which room at all for his prior service at Earl's extends from his early youth till after the Croombe, not to speak of his painting and Restoration, is to be considered as dividing other occupations attributed to him while itself into three parts. First of all, from there. It seems more natural to suppose, his early youth onwards, for an uncertain as we have done, that he did not leave Earl's number of years, but probably till about Croombe for Wrest till about the year 1639, when he would be twenty-seven years 1639; in which year, as Mr. Bell himself of age, we find him acting as clerk in the informs us, Selden, by the death of the Earl service of Thomas Jeffries, of Earl's of Kent, became permanently domesticated Croombe, a flourishing Justice of Peace in in the household of the Countess at Wrest, his native county of Worcestershire. While and that on a more intimate footing than in this service, he is said to have had some when the Earl had been alive. The fact thoughts of turning painter; and, as late as that Butler is always represented by his the middle of last century, there were some biographers as having entered the service portraits and other pictures at Earl's of the Countess of Kent, seems to confirm this; and in other respects it accords with | laid out, Butler first felt his vocation to litthe facts. If Butler did enter this service erature, and first secretly practised the in 1639, when he was in his twenty-eighth talent which was afterwards to make him year, he may have remained in it till 1651, famous. Now, if our chronology is correct, in which year the Countess died, leaving Sel- we have little hesitation in saying that it was den her executor and part-heir; and still somewhere in what we have represented as there would be ample time left for a third the middle portion of his adult life prior to and different service which Butler is said to the Restoration-that is, during his service have discharged before the Restoration with the Countess of Kent at Wrest, in Bednamely, that of secretary, or general man fordshire, from 1639 to 1651. of business, to Sir Samuel Luke of Cople We found this opinion on the evidence Hoo, in the same county of Bedfordshire. afforded by what remains of his writings, in Sir Samuel was one of the leading Presby- addition to Hudibras. Of all these writings terians of the county, and a Justice of Peace.—whether those included in the "Genuine He had been a Colonel in the Parliamentary Remains," published from the actual manuarmy during the Civil Wars, and Member scripts by Mr. Thyer of Manchester in in the Long Parliament for Bedfordshire; 1759, and which are indubitably authentic, and, though with others of the Presbyterian or such other casual pieces in prose or verse, leaders, he had shrunk back from the ex-not included among these, as there is any treme proceedings of the Parliament about probable ground for believing to have been the time of the King's death, and had, in really his-there is not one which we can consequence, been one of those members ascertain to have been published prior to whom the army leaders and Independents 1660, or, at all events, to 1659, if indeed "secluded" about this time from farther any one of them was published prior to attendance in the House, he yet appears to Hudibras itself in 1663. But, though none have retained his zeal in the general cause of them was certainly published before this of the Revolution, and to have been an period, there are one or two of them which active magistrate in Bedfordshire under were certainly written before it. Among Cromwell's government. The precise na- these, the earliest to which we can assign a ture of Butler's duties in his service cannot probable date, is a piece of rude doggrel, be known; but if he entered it after 1651, calling itself a Ballad," and seemingly when the Civil Wars in England were over, meant as a squib against Cromwell, about and the Commonwealth was an established the time of his military successes and parafact, they may very well have been such as mount influence in the kingdom, just before a secretary, though of Royalist connexions the King's death. It occurs among Thyer's and sentiments himself, might consistently "Genuine Remains," where it is printed enough discharge for a Presbyterian master. from the manuscript. Here is a specimen, As to the duration of this service, however, part of a portrait, which must be supposed we are totally uninformed. We have as- to be that of Cromwell :sumed it to have begun in 1651, and it may have continued till 1660 or thereaboutsi. e., through the period of the first Rump, and the Protectorships of Cromwell and his son Richard, down to the confusions of the second Rump and Monk's intrigues immediately antecedent to the King's recall. When the King had returned, it would be natural, amid the general change of system, for Presbyterian knights and county magistrates to sink into comparative idleness and obscurity, and for their secretaries, especially if of Royalist connexions, to look about for other situations. Such is the meagre outline, with which we must be content, of the first forty-eight years of Butler's life. It is possible, indeed, that farther research might disclose additional facts, or at least verify or disprove the conjectures we have ventured to make as to the dates of such facts as are known. Meanwhile, what concerns us is to ascertain, if 66 "His face is round and decent, "On both sides of th' aforesaid Are eyes, but th' are not matches, To be seen two fair "Now this with admiration That a beard should grow "He has no skull, 'tis well known Does keep his brains in possible, at what point in the life, as thus And so on, through a score or so of stanzas more, the last of which, containing an allu- till afterwards. This piece consists of "Two sion to the King and Parliament as both Speeches made in the Rump-Parliament still extant, and to the civil wars as still when it was restored by the Officers of the raging, enables one to assign the year 1648, Army in the year 1659," the said speeches or thereby, as the probable date of the com- being mock-harangues, invented by Butler, position. Such as it is, it is the first authen- and put, the one into the mouth of an old tic piece from Butler's pen that remains to Presbyterian member of the House, who is us; and that which comes nearest to it in indignant at all that has been done by the point of time is a short prose tract, entitled army during the last ten years; and the "The Case of King Charles I. truly stated," other into the mouth of an Independent, or originally published from the manuscript in Army-man, who hates the Presbyterians. 1691, by an anonymous editor, after Butler's The composition is one of some vigour; and death, and reprinted by Thyer. This tract the writer makes the two debaters abuse each is in the form of a reply to a pamphlet, en- other, very much as Hudibras and Ralph do titled "King Charles's Case, or an Appeal in the poem, only in sober earnest, and so as to all Rational Men concerning his Trial," to produce an impression unfavourable both prepared by John Cook, Master of Gray's to a continuance of military rule or IndepenInn, solicitor to the Parliament in the pro- dency, and to a revival of mere Parliamenceedings against the King, and afterwards tary government without a royal head. Had executed as one of the chief regicides. The the pamphlet been published, it would really pamphlet was put in circulation with others, have done some service in the cause of the after the King's death, in defence of the policy Restoration, while that question was being of the Commonwealth leaders; and Butler appears to have tried his hand at writing an answer, with the intention of publishing it some time or other. He never did so, however, and it was found among his papers. It may be assumed to have been written some time between 1649 and 1654, the anonymous editor of 1691 speaking of it as having been "penned about forty years since." Next, in point of certain date, among Butler's remains, is a piece of doggrel similar in style to that above quoted, entitled, "A Ballad about the Parliament which deliberated about making Oliver King." It begins: "As close as a goose Sat the Parliament House, And Oliver came forth Noll." debated, and Monk's intentions were uncertain. It is evident, in short, that Butler took a great interest in that question; and it is possible that, though the composition just mentioned was not printed, he may about this time have contributed other pieces of a political tenor which did find their way into circulation. The result of this brief investigation is, that it was not till about the thirty-seventh year of Butler's age, and when, according to our chronology, he was in the service of the Countess of Kent, at her seat in Bedfordshire, that he began to use his pen for any thing like a literary purpose, and that from that time he used it only sparingly, in occasional pieces of verse and of prose satire against the Puritans, till about the eve of the Restoration, when, being then in Sir Samuel Luke's service in the same county of Bedfordshire, or just about to quit that service, he found himself a sufficiently expert writer to wish to appear as such, and capable not only of throwing off political pamphlets suited for the time, but also of planning and preparing a burlesque poem of some length. The topic of this piece of doggrel fixes its date at about 1656-1657, when the propriety of Oliver's exchanging the title of Protector for that of King was a matter of general discussion. Butler, among others, had his notions on the subject, of which he relieved This account, probable on external grounds, himself, for his own satisfaction, or probably corresponds with the impression we have of for the amusement of those about him, as Butler's character. Always a shrewd, inabove. After the death of Cromwell, and dustrious, and reading man, with a quantity amid the confusions of Richard's brief Pro- of grim crabbed satire in him, which may tectorate and the second Rump, there was have come out in his talk, he was evidently, less reason for reserve in such expressions as we have already said, not one of that class of opinion; and, accordingly, during the year of writers who, like Milton and Cowley, take immediately preceding the Restoration, But- naturally from their childhood to literary ler's pen seems to have been somewhat busy. effort, as ducklings do to the water. He Besides other scraps, there is one prose piece could always, we have no doubt, write excelof some length, the composition of which lent business-prose; but he may have been may be certainly attributed to the year comparatively advanced in life before the 1659-1660, though it remained unpublished idea occurred to him of breaking up this "He scorneth all laws and martial stops, "He dives for riches down to the bottom, Song of 1651-1658. business-prose, and enriching it, and fining almond. Certainly 'tis no human visage, but the it, and putting all his wit, and force, and emblem of a mandrake, one scarce handsome power of learned allusion into it, so as to fit enough to have been the progeny of Hecuba, had it for the purposes of literature. Much more she whelped him."-Pamphlet of the year 1649. may it have required a distinct stimulus from "Of all professions in the town, without to put the idea into his head of rising The brewer's trade hath gained renown; above his prose altogether and becoming a His liquor reaches up to the crown,— poet. Such a stimulus he found at last in Which nobody can deny. the unusual social and political incidents of his time acting on his long constitutional and acquired antipathy to the Puritans. It was antipathy to the Puritans that caused Butler in middle life, at a time when he was probably known by his Bedfordshire neighbours only as a hard-headed and somewhat crusty and eccentric man of business, to become an author and a poet. He was not the only man who was so affected. Denham, in his mock-address, in the name of the poets of It was certainly no arrogance in Butler, England, to the Long Parliament, declares even if he had never written anything before, that one effect of their proceedings had been to think that he could do better than this. to make the whole nation, including King The main qualification-that of positive irCharles himself, poets. The drift of this reconcilable dislike to the Puritans, and their lame conceit is, that the Parliament had whole mode of thought, speech, and actionmade at least one of the incentives to poetry, he had in perfection. No one can understand namely poverty, general enough throughout Butler who fails distinctly to conceive this. the kingdom. In a somewhat different sense, His antipathy to the Puritans in all their Denham's conceit may be taken as true. If branches and denominations, from the most there was less of poetry proper in England moderate Presbyterian to the most fanatical in that age of social convulsion, there was sectary and Fifth-monarchy man, was no more of that kind of poetry which consists in assumed feeling; it was an honest inborn social and political allusion put into verse. aversion, an absolute incapacity of finding Baulked of any more effective way of giving anything in that order of ideas or things with vent to their hatred of the Puritans, the which he could sympathize; a crabbed conRoyalists took their revenge in abundance stitutional disgust with it all as cant, humof satirical squibs and ballads. Just as now bug, hypocrisy, and delusion. A man, whose we sometimes see a shrewd middle-aged habit it was to "censure things to be either citizen, or country-squire, who never sus- well or ill," there were probably very few pected himself of any literary tendency, things that he would in any circumstances suddenly moved by his interest in some con- have censured to be well; but there could troversy to write to the newspapers, or per- not by possibility have been an ensemble of haps to pen a pamphlet, and by that one fatal things more calculated to provoke his peract parting with his liberty for ever after, petual ill-censure than that in the midst of and selling himself, body and soul, to the which he found himself. Like Swift, an obprinter's devil, so it was then. Rough old stinately descendental man, or bigot for the cavaliers, rather shaky in their syntax, fur- hard terrestrial sense of things, and yet living bished it up for the occasion, that they might in an age when transcendentalism had broken have a slap at the Roundheads one way if loose, and seemed to be whirling heaven and they could not have it in another; and fellows earth together, he must have plodded about who had never found the legitimate source of Bedfordshire with a kind of sneering convicpoetical inspiration at twenty in their mis- tion on his face that very few besides himself tress's eyebrow, were inspired at last, at still knew it to be only Bedfordshire, and forty, by Oliver Cromwell's nose. If a not a county in some celestial kingdom. sample is wanted, take the following, two The more he saw of the Puritans in his own scraps from a mountain of similar stuff: "Cromwell wants neither wardrobe nor armour; his face is natural buff, and his skin may furnish him with a rusty coat-of-mail. You would think he had been christened in a lime-pit, and tanned alive; but his countenance still continues mangy. We cry out against superstition, and yet we worship a piece of wainscot, and idolize an unblanched neighbourhood, and the farther that party advanced, throughout the nation at large, from their first beginnings of zeal to their last exhibitions of religious and political enthusiasm, the more they became to him an object of satire; and if, at Sir Samuel Luke's or anywhere else, he was thrown much among their chief men, so as to have opportunities |