Samuel Butler was an English poet and satirist, best renowned for his satirical poem entitled Hudibras.
Background
Samuel Butler was born in Strensham, Worcestershire, and was the son of a farmer. His date of birth is unknown, but there is documentary evidence for the date of his baptism.Butler was buried at St. Paul's, Covent Garden. Also, a monument to him was placed in Westminster Abbey in 1732 by a printer with the surname Barber, and the Lord Mayor of London. There is a memorial plaque to him in the small village church of Strensham, Worcestershire, near the town of Upton upon Severn, his birthplace
Career
In early youth Butler was a servant to the Countess of Kent. After the Restoration he became secretary to Richard Vaughan, 2nd Earl of Carbery, Lord President of Wales. Butler began Hudibras while lodging in Holborn around 1658. He gave up his stewardship in January 1662 and the first part of Hudibras was published in December of the same year.Butler is thought to have been in the employment of the Duke of Buckingham in the summer of 1670, and accompanied him on a diplomatic mission to France. He also received financial support in the form of a grant from King Charles II.
Most of his other writings never saw print until they were collected and published by Robert Thyer in 1759. Butler wrote many short biographies, epigrams and verses the earliest surviving from 1644. Of his verses, the best known is "The Elephant on the Moon", about a mouse in a telescope, a satire on Sir Paul Neale of the Royal Society. Butler's taste for the mock heroic is shown by another early poem Cynarctomachy, or Battle between Bear and Dogs, which is both a homage to and a parody of a Greek poem ascribed to Homer, Batrachomyomachia. His supposed lack of money later in life is strange as he had numerous unpublished works which could have offered him income including a set of Theophrastan character sketches which were not printed until 1759. Many other works are dubiously attributed to him.
Views
Quotations:
When civil fury 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...
There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
They who study mathematiks only to fix their minds, and render them the steadyer to apply to all other things, as there are many who profess to do, are as wise as those who think by rowing boats, to learn to swim.