was compelled to consign the
bard to an obscure burial-place in Paul's, Covent Garden.[314] Many
years after, when Alderman Barber raised an inscription to the memory of
Butler in Westminster Abbey, others were desirous of placing one over
the poet's humble gravestone. This probably excited some competition:
and the following fine one, attributed to Dennis, has perhaps never been
published. If it be Dennis's, it must have been composed in one of his
most lucid moments.

Near this place lies interred
The body of Mr. Samuel Butler,
Author of Hudibras.
He was a whole species of Poets in one!
Admirable in a Manner
In which no one else has been tolerable;
A Manner which began and ended in Him;
In which he knew no Guide,
And has found no Followers.[315]

To this too brief article I add a proof that that fanaticism which is
branded by our immortal Butler can survive the castigation. Folly is
sometimes immortal, as nonsense is sometimes irrefutable. Ancient
follies revive, and men repeat the same unintelligible jargon: just as
contagion keeps up the plague in Turkey by lying hid in some obscure
corner, till it breaks out afresh. Recently we have seen a notable
instance where one of the school to which we are alluding declares of
Shakspeare that "it would have been happy if he had never been born, for
that thousands will look back with incessant anguish on the guilty
delight which the plays of Shakspeare ministered to them."[316] Such is
the anathema of Shakspeare! We have another of Butler, in "An Historic
Defence of Experimental Religion;" in which the author contends, that
the best men have experienced the agency of the Holy Spirit in an
immediate illumination from heaven. He furnishes his historic proofs by
a list from Abel to Lady Huntingdon! The author of Hudibras is
denounced, "_One_ Samuel Butler, a celebrated _buffoon_ in the abandoned
reign of Charles the Second, wrote a mock-heroic poem, in which he
undertook to burlesque the pious puritan. He ridicules all the gracious
promises by comparing the _divine illumination_ to an _ignis fatuus_,
and dark lantern of the spirit."[317] Such are the writers whose ascetic
spirit is still descending among us from the monkery of the deserts,
adding poignancy to the very ridicule they would annihilate. The satire
which we deemed obsolete, we find still applicable to contemporaries!

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