Background
Samuel Butler was baptized at Strensham, Worcestershire, England on the 8th of February 1612; the son of Samuel Butler, a small farmer.
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( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
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Samuel Butler was baptized at Strensham, Worcestershire, England on the 8th of February 1612; the son of Samuel Butler, a small farmer.
He was educated at the King's school, Worcester, under Henry Bright, the record of whose zeal as a teacher is preserved by Fuller (Worthies, Worcestershire).
After leaving school he served a Mr Jeffereys of Earl's Croome, Worcestershire, in the capacity of justice's clerk, and is supposed to have thus gained his knowledge of law and law terms. He also employed himself at Earl's Croome in general study, and particularly in painting, which he is said to have thought of adopting as a profession. It is probable, however, that art has not lost by his change of mind, for, according to one of his editors, in 1774 his pictures "served to stop windows and save the tax; indeed they were not fit for much else. " He was then recommended to Elizabeth, countess of Kent. At her home at Wrest, Bedfordshire, he had access to a good library, and there too he met Selden, who sometimes employed him as his secretary. But his third sojourn, with Sir Samuel Luke at Cople Hoo, Bedfordshire, was not only apparently the longest, but also much the most important in its effects on his career and works. We are nowhere informed in what capacity Butler served Sir Samuel Luke, or how he came to reside in the house of a noted Puritan and Parliament man. In the family of this "valiant Mamaluke, " who, whether he was or was not the original of Hudibras, was certainly a rigid Presbyterian, "a colonel in the army of the Parliament, scoutmaster- general for Bedfordshire and governor of Newport Pagnell, " Butler must have had the most abundant opportunities of studying from the life those who were to be the victims of his satire; he is supposed to have taken some hints for his caricature from Sir Henry Rosewell of Ford Abbey, Devonshire. But we know nothing positive of him until the Restoration, when he was appointed secretary to Richard Vaughan, 2nd earl of Carbery, lord president of the principality of Wales, who made him steward of Ludlow Castle, an office which he held from January 1661 to January 1662.
Early in 1663 Hudibras: The First Part: written in the Time of the Late Wars, was published, but this, the first genuine edition, had been preceded in 1662 by an unauthorized one. On the 26th of December Pepys bought it, and though neither then nor afterwards could he see the wit of "so silly an abuse of the Presbyter knight going to the wars, " he repeatedly testifies to its extraordinary popularity. A spurious second part appeared within the year. This determined the poet to bring out the second part (licensed on the 7th of November 1663, printed 1664), which if possible exceeded the first in popularity. From this time till 1678, the date of the publication of the third part, we hear nothing certain of Butler. On the publication of Hudibras he was sent for by Lord Chancellor Hyde (Clarendon), says Aubrey, and received many promises, none of which was fulfilled. He is said to have received a gift of £300 from Charles II, and to have been secretary to George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, when the latter was chancellor of the university of Cambridge. Most of his biographers, in their eagerness to prove the ill-treatment which Butler is supposed to have received, disbelieve both these stories, perhaps without sufficient reason. Butler's satire on Buckingham in his Characters (Remains, 1759) shows such an intimate knowledge that it is probable the second story is true. Two years after the publication of the third part of Hudibras he died, on the 25th of September 1680, and was buried by his friend Longueville, a bencher of the Middle Temple, in the churchyard of St Paul's, Covent Garden.
Hudibras itself, though probably quoted as often as ever, has dropped into the class of books which are more quoted than read. In reading it, it is of the utmost importance to comprehend clearly and to bear constantly in mind the purpose of the author in writing it. This purpose is evidently not artistic but polemic, to show in the most unmistakable characters the vileness and folly of the anti-royalist party. Anything like a regular plot - the absence of which has often been deplored or excused - would have been for this end not merely a superfluity but a mistake, as likely to divert the attention and perhaps even enlist some sympathy for the heroes. Anything like regular character - drawing would have been equally unnecessary and dangerous for to represent anything but monsters, some alleviating strokes must have been introduced. The problem, therefore, was to produce characters just sufficiently unlike lay-figures to excite and maintain a moderate interest, and to set them in motion by dint of a few incidents not absolutely unconnected, - meanwhile to subject the principles and manners of which these characters were the incarnation to ceaseless satire and raillery. The triumphant solution of the problem is undeniable, when it has once been enunciated and understood. Upon a canvas thus prepared and outlined, Butler has embroidered a collection of flowers of wit, which only the utmost fertility or imagination could devise, and the utmost patience of industry elaborate. In the union of these two qualities he is certainly without a parallel, and their combination has produced a work which is unique. The poem is of considerable length, extending to more than ten thousand verses, yet Hazlitt hardly exaggerates when he says that half the lines are got by heart indeed a diligent student of later English literature has read great part of Hudibras though he may never have opened its pages. The tableaux or situations, though few and simple in construction, are ludicrous enough. The knight and squire setting forth on their journey; the routing of the bear-baiters; the disastrous renewal of the contest; Hudibras and Ralph in the stocks; the lady's release and conditional acceptance of the unlucky knight; the latter's deliberations on the means of eluding his vow; the Sldmmington; the visit to Sidrophel, the astrologer; the attempt to cajole the lady, with its woeful consequences; the consultation with the lawyer, and the immortal pair of letters to which this gives rise, complete the argument of the whole poem. But the story is as nothing; throughout we have little really k. ept before us but the sordid vices of the sectaries, their hypocrisy, their churlish ungraciousness, their greed of money and authority, their fast and loose morality, their inordinate pride. The extraordinary felicity of the means taken to place all these things in the most ridiculous light has never been questioned. The doggerel metre, never heavy or coarse, but framed as to be the very voice of mocking laughter, the astounding similes and disparates, the rhymes which seem to chuckle and to sneer of themselves, the wonderful learning with which the abuse of learning is rebuked, the subtlety with which subtle casuistry is set at nought can never be missed. Keys like those of L'Estrange are therefore of little use. It signifies nothing whether Hudibras was Sir Samuel Luke of Bedfordshire or Sir Henry Rosewell of Devonshire, still less whether Ralph's name in the flesh was Robinson or Pendle, least of all that Orsin was perhaps Mr Gosling, or Trulla possibly Miss Spencer. Butler was probably as little indebted to mere copying for his characters as for his ideas and style. These latter are in the highest degree original. The first notion of the book, and only the first notion, Butler undoubtedly received from Don Quixote. His obligations to the Satyre Menippee have been noticed by Voltaire, and though English writers have sometimes ignored or questioned them, are not to be doubted. The art, perhaps the most terrible of all the weapons of satire, of making characters without any great violation of probability represent themselves in the most atrocious and despicable light, was never perhaps possessed in perfection except by Pithou and his colleagues and by Butler. Against these great merits some defects must certainly be set. As a whole, the poem is no doubt tedious, if only on account of the very blaze of writ, which at length almost wearies us by its ceaseless demands on our attention. It should, however, be remembered that it was originally issued in parts, and therefore, it may be supposed, intended to be read in parts, for there can be little doubt that the second part was written before the first was published. A more real defect, but one which Butler shares with all his contemporaries, is the tendency to delineate humours instead of characters, and to draw from the outside rather than from within.
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Quotations: A News-monger is a Retailer of Rumour, that takes up upon Trust, and sells as cheap as he buys. He deals in a perishable Commodity, that will not keep: for if it be not fresh it lies upon his Hands, and will yield nothing. True or false is all one to him; for Novelty being the Grace of bothe, a Truth grows stale as soon as a Lye. ..
He was, we are told, "of a leonine-coloured hair, sanguine, choleric, middle-sized, strong. " A portrait by Lely at Oxford and others elsewhere represent him as somewhat hard-featured. Of the neglect of Butler by the court something must be said. It must be remembered that the complaints on the subject supposed to have been uttered by the poet all occur in the spurious posthumous works, that men of letters have been at all times but too prone to complain of lack of patronage, that Butler's actual service was rendered when the day was already won, and that the pathetic stories of the poet starving and dying in want are contradicted by the best authority-Charles Longueville, son of the poet's friend-who asserted that Butler, though often disappointed, was never reduced to anything like want or beggary and did not die in any person's debt. But the most significant notes on the subject are Aubrey's that "he might have had preferments at first, but would not accept any but very good, so at last he had none at all, and died in want"; and the memorandum of the same author, that "satirical wits disoblige whom they converse with, consequently make to themselves many enemies and few friends, and this was his manner and case. "
Quotes from others about the person
Perhaps the happiest epitaph on him is one by John Dennis, which calls Butler "a whole species of poets in one. "
About 1662 he married a rich lady, variously described as a Miss Herbert and as a widow named Morgan. His wife's fortune was afterwards, however, lost.