'O human glory vain! O Death! O wings! O worthless world! O transitory things! Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed, That still, though dead, greater than death he laid, And in his altered face you something feign That threatens Death he yet will live again. Not much unlike the sacred oak which shoots To heaven its branches, and through earth its roots, Whose spacious boughs are hung with trophies round, And honoured wreaths have oft the victor crowned, When angry Jove darts lightning through the air At mortal sins, nor his own plant will spare, It groans and bruises all below, that stood So many years the shelter of the wood. The tree, erewhile foreshortened to our view, When fallen shows taller yet than as it grew; So shall his praise to after times increase, When truth shall be allowed, and faction cease; And his own shadows with him fall; the eye Detracts from objects than itself more high; But when Death takes from them that envied state, Seeing how little, we confess how great.' Marvell's position as the satirist of his era from the Puritan and Republican point of view, was filled upon the Cavalier side by Samuel Butler, who, if general reputation and excellence in his own walk of verse are to be allowed as criterions, may claim to be the third poet of the age after Milton and Dryden. It is true that Butler, though endowed with abundance of fancy, was, strictly speaking, no poet; that he is entirely destitute of the dignity and tenderness which Marvell can display with a congenial theme; and that he possesses nothing of Dryden's power of exalting unpromising subjects into poetry. But he infinitely surpasses Marvell when they meet on the common ground of satire; and though he cannot be said to surpass Dryden, their methods are so different that no proper comparison can be drawn. When writing in Dryden's manner Butler is respectable, but he has the field of burlesque epic entirely to himself. Supremacy in a low style of composition is a surer passport to fame than moderate merit in a high one. With all the defects of Restoration literature, it had a faculty for producing masterpieces, and it must be admitted that Butler's _Hudibras_ stands as decidedly at the head of its class as _Paradise Lost_, or _Absalom and Achitophel_, or _Pilgrim's Progress_, or Pepys's _Diary_ at the head of theirs. [Sidenote: Samuel Butler (1612-1680).]