,--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.
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