it a most diverting book, as it is, historically, a most valuable one.

Perhaps the most popular book of its time was Samuel Butler's
_Hudibras_ (1663-64), a burlesque romance in ridicule of the Puritans.
The king carried a copy of it in his pocket, and Pepys testifies that
it was quoted and praised on all sides. Ridicule of the Puritans was
nothing new. Zeal-of-the-land Busy, in Ben Jonson's _Bartholomew
Fair_, is an early instance of the kind. There was nothing laughable
about the earnestness of men like Cromwell, Milton, Algernon Sidney,
and Sir Henry Vane. But even the French Revolution had its humors; and
as the English Puritan Revolution gathered head and the extremer
sectaries pressed to the front--Quakers, New Lights, Fifth Monarchy
Men, Ranters, etc.--its grotesque sides came uppermost. Butler's hero
is a Presbyterian Justice of the Peace {166} who sallies forth with his
secretary, Ralpho--an Independent and Anabaptist--like Don Quixote with
Sancho Panza, to suppress May games and bear-baitings. (Macaulay, it
will be remembered, said that the Puritans disapproved of bear-baiting,
not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to
the spectators.) The humor of _Hudibras_ is not of the finest. The
knight and squire are discomfited in broadly comic adventures, hardly
removed from the rough, physical drolleries of a pantomime or a circus.
The deep heart-laughter of Cervantes, the pathos on which his humor
rests, is, of course, not to be looked for in Butler. But he had wit
of a sharp, logical kind, and his style surprises with all manner of
verbal antics. He is almost as great a phrase-master as Pope, though
in a coarser kind. His verse is a smart doggerel, and his poem has
furnished many stock sayings, as, for example,

"'Tis strange what difference there can be
'Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee."

_Hudibras_ has had many imitators, not the least successful of whom was
the American John Trumbull, in his revolutionary satire _M'Fingal_,
some couplets of which are generally quoted as Butler's, as, for
example,

"No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law."

The rebound against Puritanism is seen no less plainly in the drama of
the Restoration, and the {167} stage now took vengeance for its
enforced silence under the Protectorate. Two theaters were opened
under the patronage, respectively, of the king and of his brother, the
Duke of York. The manag