If we apply the definitions we have made to Butler’s poem, we shall find that it is not properly humorous at all; that the nearest approach to the humorous is burlesque. Irony is Butler’s favorite weapon. But he always has an ulterior object. His characters do not live at all, but are only caricatured effigies of political enemies stuffed with bran and set up as targets for his wit. He never lets us forget for a moment that Presbyterian and Independent are primarily knaves and secondarily men. The personality never by accident expands into humanity. There is not a trace of imagination or of sympathy in his poem. It is pure satire, and intellectual satire only. There is as much creativeness in Trumbull’s “McFingal,” or Fessenden’s “Terrible Tractoration” as in “Hudibras.” Butler never works from within, but stands spectator covering his victims with merciless ridicule; and we enjoy the fun because his figures are as mere nobodies as Punch and Judy, whose misfortunes are meant to amuse us, and whose unreality is part of the sport. The characters of truly humorous writers are as real to us as any of our acquaintances. We no more doubt the existence of the Wife of Bath, of Don Quixote and Sancho, of Falstaff, Sir Roger de Coverley, Parson Adams, the Vicar, Uncle Toby, Pickwick or Major Pendennis, than we do our own. They are the contemporaries of every generation forever. They are our immortal friends whose epitaph no man shall ever write. The only incantation needed to summon them is the taking of a book from our shelf, and they are with us with their wisdom, their wit, their courtesy, their humanity, and (dearer than all) their weaknesses. But the figures of Butler are wholly contemporaneous with himself. They are dead things nailed to his age, like crows to a barn-door, for an immediate _in terrorem_ purpose, to waste and blow away with time and weather. The Guy Fawkes of a Fifth of November procession has as much manhood in it. Butler, then, is a wit--in the strictest sense of the word--with only such far-off hints at humor as lie in a sense of the odd, the droll, or the ludicrous. But in wit he is supreme. “Hudibras” is as full of point as a paper of pins; it sparkles like a phosphorescent sea, every separate drop of which contains half a dozen little fiery lives. Indeed, the fault of the poem (if it can be called a fault) is that it has too much wit to be easy reading. Butler had been a great reader, and out of the dryest books of school divinity, Puritan theology, metaphysics, medicine, astrology, mathematics, no matter what, his brain secreted wit as naturally as a field of corn will get so much silex out of a soil as would make flints for a whole arsenal of old-fashioned muskets, and where even Prometheus himself could not have found enough to strike a light with. I do sincerely believe that he would have found fun in a joke of Senator--well, any senator; and that is saying a great deal. I speak of course, of senators at Washington.