The Age of Dryden. Richard Garnett

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      There is no heaven in marriages.’

      Butler’s Hudibras may perhaps be best defined as a metrical parody upon Don Quixote, with a spice of allusion to the Faerie Queene, in which the nobility and pathos of the originals are designedly obliterated, and the humour exaggerated into farce to suit the author’s polemic purpose. His design is to kill Presbyterianism and Independency by ridicule, and he is consequently compelled to shut his eyes to everything in them except their occasional tendency to baseness, and their perpetual liability to cant. This is the constant Nemesis of the satirist; but Butler is even more of a caricaturist than the situation called for. The endurance of his poem to our own times, however, is sufficient proof that, although a caricature, it was not a libel, and amid the enthusiastic reaction of the Restoration it may well have passed for a fair portrait. The machinery is closely modelled upon Don Quixote. Presbyterianism is incarnated in the doughty justice of the peace, Sir Hudibras; Independency and new light sectarianism in general in his squire, Ralpho; and the two sally forth in quest of adventure quite in the style of Don Quixote and Sancho, except that the Don’s great aim is to deliver damsels, and Hudibras’s to imprison them. Though the scene appears to be laid in the west of England, there is no reason to doubt the tradition that the prototype of Hudibras’s satire was Butler’s master, the Bedfordshire magistrate, Sir Samuel Luke, who is evidently alluded to where a rhyme to Mameluke is left blank to be supplied by the reader’s ingenuity. If, as is more than probable, this worthy justice was given to suppressing bear-baitings, Butler would need no more material for his burlesque; and the first part of the poem, at all events, may well have been written while he was in Sir Samuel’s employment. It seems, from internal evidence, to have been composed before Cromwell had ejected the Long Parliament, and its general atmosphere almost precludes the idea of its having been written after the execution of Charles I. The second part has many allusions to later events. The description of Hudibras, mind and body, is so vivid and precise as to present internal evidence of having been drawn from a living model, while Ralpho is in comparison vague. Soon after sallying forth the pair find themselves at odds with a crowd about to revel in the amusement of bear-baiting, which they proceed to interrupt; not, as has been remarked, out of compassion to the bear, but out of grudge to the public. This brings on a fight, most amusingly described, but at somewhat too great length; the ‘fatal facility’ of the octosyllabic couplet being nowhere more conspicuous than in Butler’s humorous doggrel. After various turns of fortune, the knight and squire find themselves in the stocks, where they sit until Hudibras’s lady-love, a frolicsome widow with a jointure, appears to the rescue:

      The mischievous lady, nevertheless, only consents to liberate Hudibras upon condition that he shall administer a sound flogging to himself. Hudibras willingly promises this, and is released, but next day he thinks better of it, and consults Ralpho whether he is actually bound by his oath. Ralpho’s reply abounds with the pithy couplets so frequent in Hudibras, which have become a part of the language: