dies were grand historical compositions, founded upon the traditional or mythologic legends of the people for whom they were written, and whose religious and patriotic feelings were in the highest degree appealed to by what they considered as a sacred and affecting representation; exactly as the rude audience of the Middle Ages had their sensibilities powerfully excited by the mysteries. The Greek dramas were, in fact, the mysteries and miracle-plays of the Pagan world, and differed from those of the thirteenth century only in their greater polish and refinement as compositions. Now, the legends of classical mythology necessarily affect no less than the stories of the Scripture history; and consequently the 'Samson' (being in all points of structure and arrangement an exact fac-simile of a Greek tragedy) produces upon us, Christians, an effect infinitely more analogous to that made upon an Athenian by a tragedy of Sophocles than could be produced by our reading the best mere translation of a tragedy of Sophocles that the skill of man ever executed.

InComus' Milton has given us the most perfect and exquisite specimen of a masque, or rather he has given us a kind of ennobled and glorified masque. The refinement, the elegance, the courtly grace and chivalry-all is there; but there is something in Comus' better, loftier, and grander than all this-something which no other masques, with all their refined, and scholarlike, and airy elegance, have ever approached—a high and philosophic vein of morality:— "Divine philosophy,

Not harsh and rugged, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute;"

deep and grand thoughts fetched from the exhaustless fountains of the great minds of old-his beloved Plato and the Stagyrite-thoughts fresh with the immortality of their birthplace.

CHAPTER X.

BUTLER AND DRYDEN.

The Commonwealth and the Restoration - Milton and Butler-Subject and Nature of Hudibras - Hudibras and Don Quixote-State of Society at the Restoration-Butler's Life - John Dryden-French Taste of the CourtComedies and Rhymed Tragedies-Life and Works of Dryden--DramasAnnus Mirabilis - Absalom and Achitophel-Religio Laici-Hind and Panther-Dryden's later Works-Translation of Virgil-Odes-FablesPrefaces and Dedications-Juvenal - Mac Flecknoe.

THE great productions of literature may be looked at under two different aspects or relations. Every illustrious name in letters may be considered as typifying and expressing some great and strongly

marked epoch in the history of man in general, and also as the offspring and embodiment of some particular era, or some peculiar state of feeling existing in the nation of which that name is an ornament: that is to say, criticism may be general or particular, cosmopolite or national. Thus Milton, viewed as a colossal intellect, without any reference to his particular century or country, may be looked upon as the type and offspring of the Reformation and of the republican spirit combined; regarded with reference to England and the seventeenth century, he will be found to embody the Commonwealththat stirring and extraordinary period of British history, when the united influences of those two mighty phenomena were acting on a stage sufficiently limited, and during a period sufficiently short, to enable us to form a clear and well-defined idea of their character. The period at which Milton wrote was, as we have seen, a period of vehement struggle between powerful and opposite principles: and if in the illustrious author of Paradise Lost' we find the eloquent assertor of the liberty of the press, and the uncompromising advocate for democratic forms of government, we cannot be surprised if we behold, in the ranks of the royalist party, a mighty champion of monarchy, and an irresistible satirist of the follies and vices of the republicans. This champion, this satirist, is Samuel Butler, perhaps the greatest master who ever lived of the comic or burlesque species of satiric writing-a strange and singular genius, whose powers of ridicule were as incomparable as the story of his life is melancholy. In point of learning, vast, multifarious, and exact, he was no unworthy rival of Milton: in originality of conception and brilliancy of form his work is unequalled; indeed, Hudibras' is one of those productions which may be said to stand alone in literature. It is not to be denied that the reputation obtained out of England by this extraordinary work is by no means commensurate with its real merit as an effort of genius and originality, or with the vast store of wisdom and of wit contained in its pages; nor is it even probable that this indifference to its merits will ever at any future period be less than it has hitherto been, or than it is at present. It arises from a very natural cause. The subject of Butler's satire was too local and temporary to command that degree of attention in other countries, without which the highest powers of humour and imagination will have been exerted in vain. It is undoubtedly true that the vices, the crimes, the follies so pitilessly ridiculed in 'Hudibras' are common to mankind in almost every state of civilized society; but we must no less remember that some of the more prominent of them never burst forth into so full a bloom of absurdity and extravagance as they did at the memorable epoch of English history which he has caricatured. The Commonwealth and the Protectorate form a revolutionary epoch, and, like all epochs of revolution, were fertile in strong contrasts of political and social physiognomy. Such periods,

acting, as they so powerfully do, upon the manners of a people, are admirably suited for the purposes of the satiric poet. At such times the elements of faction, the extravagances of opinion, of sentiment, of manners, of costume, are brought prominently out upon the surface of society, and present themselves, so to say, in a condensed and tangible form, which the satirist has only to copy to produce a vivid and striking picture-fortunate, too, if a future age, free from these violent agitations and strong contrasts, does not charge him with exaggeration, and mistake the grotesque but faithful delineations of his pencil for the sportiveness of caricature. Curious as they are to the moral speculator, and full of matter to the studious searcher into the history of party, the absurdities of that legion of fanatical sects by whom the destinies of England were then swayed are neither sufficiently attractive or picturesque in themselves, nor sufficiently well known to the general European reader, for Butler's admirable pictures of them to be generally studied or understood out of England; for with political satire, no less than political caricature, much of the point of the jest is lost to those who are not able to judge of the likeness.

It may be objected that, to the great body of English readers, the very considerable time that has elapsed since the occurrences took place which Butler has ridiculed, and the total disappearance of the things and the men represented in his poem, must have rendered them as strange and almost as unintelligible as they are to the nonEnglish reader, from remoteness of place as well as distance of time, and dissimilarity of manners, customs, and sentiments. This is undoubtedly true to some extent: but the intensely idiomatic spirit of this excellent writer has given to his work a sap and a vitality which no obsoleteness of subject could destroy. An immense number of his verses have passed into the ordinary everyday language of his countrymen containing, as they often do, the condensed thought of proverbs, they have fixed themselves on the memory of the people by their proverb-like oddity and humour of expression, and often by the quaint jingle of their rhymes. Thus multitudes of Butler's couplets float loosely in the element of ordinary English dialogue, and are often heard from the mouths of men who are themselves ignorant of the source of these very expressions, and who possibly hardly know that such a poet as Butler and such a poem as 'Hudi. bras' ever existed. The fundamental idea of 'Hudibras' is, in our opinion, singularly happy. The title of the poem, which is also the name of its hero, is taken from the old romances of chivalry, Sir Hugh de Bras being the appellation of one of the knights (an Englishman, too, according to the legend) of Arthur's fabulous Round Table. Much also of the structure of the poem is a kind of burlesque of those ancient romances; and the very versification itself is the rhymed octosyllable so much employed by the Norrian

trouvères, a measure singularly well adapted for continuous and easy narrative, and consequently peculiarly fit for burlesque. Of comic poetry, part of whose humour consists in a resemblance or contrast between a ludicrous imitation and a serious or elevated ́original, there are two principal species. In the one, the characters, events, language, and style of a sublime and pathetic work are retained, but mingled with mean and ludicrous objects; as when the heroes of the Iliad' are represented as cowards, gluttons, and thieves and in the other, trivial or ridiculous personages and events are described with a pomp of language and an affected dignity of style wholly disproportioned to their real importance. The former species of writing, it is hardly necessary to say, is called burlesque, and the second mock-heroic. Of the first kind are the innumerable travesties of the ancient poets; and of the second both the French literature and the English possess excellent specimens, though the 'Lutrin' is not to be compared to the 'Rape of the Lock.' Although both these kinds of comic writing may appear to have been the offspring of a considerably advanced period of literature, it is nevertheless certain that specimens of them are to be found at an exceedingly early epoch even in the very infancy of poetry in the heroic age, and in its second birth or avatar of the romantic or chivalric period of the Middle Ages. We need only mention, in proof of our first proposition, the Battle of the Frogs and Mice,' falsely, it is obvious, ascribed to Homer, but still a work of very high antiquity; and also we may refer to many of the comedies of Aristophanes.

As to our second position-that in which we speak of the existence in the Middle Ages of this kind of comic writing-it will be neces sary to refer rather more fully to the literature of that early period, not only because this section of it is less likely to be familiar to our readers, but also because it bears more immediately upon the subject in hand—' Hudibras' being, to a certain degree, a burlesque of the tales of chivalry which form the staple of medieval literature. We have, then, numberless proofs that the solemn, wonderful, and stately romance of the trouvère was often parodied, and that ludicrous and burlesque poems were frequently written, for the purpose of exciting mirth, in which the stately manners and occupations of the knight were represented in connexion with the ignorance, rudeness, and coarse merriment of the peasant; somewhat in a similar manner as we find in the Attic theatre the terrible and pathetic tragedy made a source of laughter in the satiric drama, which is supposed to have formed a part of the trilogy of the ancients. Of these latter only one example now exists, in the Cyclops' of Euripides, an admirable and most laughable jeu d'esprit, in which the heroic manners and adventure of Ulysses and Polyphemus are evidently travestied from a serious tragic version (now lost) of the same adventure, which formed one of the members of the same trilogy. Not to speak of the ancient Norman subdivi

sion of the Romanz poetry, we need not look farther than our own country to find several examples of the same kind of humour existing in the chivalrous literature of the Middle Ages. And the thing is natural enough; the taste and feeling of the ludicrous, which seems innate in the human mind, will find a ready food in the serious or elevated productions fashionable in any age or country. Among the early English poems to which we have alluded there are two which are not only admirable for their oddity and humour, but curious, as presenting perfect examples of the principle of which we are speaking: these are the 'Tournament of Tottenham' and the 'Hunting of the Hare.' In the former of these singular jeu d'esprit the reader will find a very lively parody of the language, sentiment, and usages of the chivalric period. The subject is a solemn tourney, or passage of arms," in which the actors are clowns and peasants instead of high-born and gentle knights, and in which the peculiar terms and ceremonies of these solemn and splendid spectacles are most ludicrously burlesqued and misapplied. In the Hunting of the Hare' the leading idea is nearly similar, with the exception that it is not the language and the usages of the tournament which are burlesqued by their connexion with the lowest order of the people, but the terms and, if we may so style it, the technology of the art of venery-an art which was in those ages considered as only second in importance to the science of war, which possessed a language of its own no less complicated and elaborate, and was, no less than it, the peculiar privilege of the nobles. In this curious poem the "baseborn churls" go out to hunt the hare with all the ceremonies of knightly venery and the poem, which describes their mishaps and their ignorant misapplication of terms and customs, produced its effect in a similar way to the laughable caricature of military and heraldic splendour in the 'Tournament of Tottenham.'

"Cervantes laugh'd Spain's chivalry away,"

6

says Byron; and though it is an error to suppose that the ludicrous adventures of the Knight of La Mancha can in any sense be said to have destroyed a system which had ceased to exist when Cervantes wrote, yet every reader must feel how much of the comic effect of this immortal work arises from the strong contrast and want of harmony between the Don's peculiar train of ideas and the social condition of the times in which he attempts to realise his hallucination. So completely indeed had knight-errantry ceased to exist at the period when the Don is supposed to set out on his adventures, that Cervantes was obliged to adopt the idea of insanity in his hero ere he could bring in contact two states of society-two conditions of sentiment so incompatible as the chivalric age and the real manners of his own day. But every one sees how much the ludicrous effect is heightened, nay, how completely it proceeds from this forcible