But it does not follow that we can put the finger on this and that person as having “begun” the new movement. Such an opinion is always tempting to not too judicious inquirers, and there has been no lack of books on _Le Romantisme des Classiques_ and the like. The fact, of course, simply is that everything human exists essentially or potentially in the men of every time; and that you may not only find books in the running brooks but (what appears at first more contradictory) dry stones in them: while, on the other hand, founts of water habitually gush from the midst of the driest rock. Indagation of the kind is always treacherous, and has to be conducted with a great deal of circumspection. [Sidenote: _Case of Butler on Rymer, Denham,_] It would be difficult to find an author who illustrates this danger and treachery better than Butler, whom some may have been surprised not to find in the last volume. The author of _Hudibras_ was born not long after Milton, and nearly twenty years before Dryden, who outlived him by the same space. His great poem did not give much room for critical utterances in literature; but the _Genuine Remains_[4] are full of it in separate places, both verse and prose. Take these singly, and you may make Butler out to be, not merely a critic, but half a dozen critics. In perhaps the best known of his minor pieces, the _Repartees between Cat and Puss_, he satirises “Heroic” Plays, and is therefore clearly for “the last age,” as also in the savage and admirable “On Critics who Judge Modern Plays precisely by the Rules of the Ancients,” which has been reasonably, or certainly, thought to be directed against Rymer’s blasphemy of Beaumont and Fletcher, published two years before Butler’s death. The satirist’s references and illustrations (as in that to “the laws of good King Howel’s days”) are sometimes too Caroline to be quotable; but the force and sweep of his protest is simply glorious. The _Panegyric on Sir John Denham_ is chiefly personal; but if Butler had been convinced that _Cooper’s Hill_ was the _ne plus ultra_ of English poetry he could hardly have written it: and though the main victim of “To a Bad Poet” has not been identified,[5] the lines— “For so the rhyme be at the verse’s end, No matter whither all the rest does tend”— could scarcely have been written except against the new poetry. The “Pindaric Ode on Modern Critics” is chiefly directed against the general critical vice of snarling, and the passages on critics and poets in the _Miscellaneous Thoughts_ follow suit. But if we had only the verse _Remains_ we should be to some extent justified in taking Butler, if not for a precursor of the new Romanticism, at any rate for a rather strenuous defender of the old. [Sidenote: _and Benlowes._]