The imaginative side of Puritanism found its poetical expression in Milton and its prose in Bunyan. The intellectual vagaries of its decline were to have their satirist in Butler. He was born at Strensham in Worcestershire in 1612, the son of a small farmer who was obliged to pinch himself to afford his son a grammar-school education. It is more than doubtful whether he were ever at any university at all. His first employment was as clerk to Mr. Jeffereys, a Worcestershire justice of the peace, called by the poet’s biographers an eminent one. While in this situation he employed his leisure in study, and in cultivating music and painting, for both of which arts he had a predilection. He next went into the family of the Countess of Kent, where he had the use of a fine library, and where he acted as amanuensis to John Selden--the mere drippings of whose learning were enough to make a great scholar of him. After this he was employed (in what capacity is unknown) in the house of Sir Samuel Luke, an officer of Cromwell, and a rigid Presbyterian. It was here that he made his studies for the characters of _Sir Hudibras_ and his squire, _Ralpho_, and is supposed to have begun the composition of his great work. There is hardly anything more comic in “Hudibras” itself than the solemn Country Knight unconsciously furnishing clothes from his wardrobe, and a rope of his own twisting, to hang himself in eternal effigy with. Butler has been charged with ingratitude for having caricatured his employer; but there is no hint of any obligation he was under, and the service of a man like him must have been a fair equivalent for any wages. On the other hand, it has been asserted that Butler did not mean Sir Samuel Luke at all, but a certain Sir Henry Rosewell, or a certain Colonel Rolle, both Devonshire men. And in confirmation of it we are told that Sir Hugh de Bras was the tutelary saint of Devonshire. Butler, however, did not have so far to go for a name, but borrowed it from Spenser. He himself is the authority for the “conjecture,” as it is called, that his hero and Sir Samuel Luke were identical. At the end of the first canto of part first of “Hudibras” occurs a couplet of which the last part of the second verse is left blank. This couplet, for want of attention to the accent, has been taken to be in ten-syllable measure, and therefore an exception to the rest of the poem. But it is only where we read it as a verse of four feet that the inevitable rhyme becomes perfectly Hudibrastic. The knight himself is the speaker: ’Tis sung there is a valiant Mameluke In foreign lands yclept (Sir Sam Luke) To whom we have been oft compared For person, parts, address and beard. Butler died poor, but not in want, on the 25th of September, 1680, in his sixty-eighth year.