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 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 the squire are
discomfited in broadly comic adventures, hardly removed from the rough
physical drolleries of a pantomime or 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 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 manager of the latter, Sir William Davenant--who had fought on
the king's side, been knighted for his services, escaped to France, and
was afterward captured and imprisoned in England for two years--had
managed to evade the law against stage plays as early as 1656, by
presenting his _Siege of Rhodes_ as an "opera," with instrumental music
and dialogue in recitative, after a fashion newly sprung up in Italy.
This he brought out again in 1661, with the dialogue recast into ri