Hudibras had also the like honor of suggesting its scheme and measure and jingle to an early American poem-that of McFingal, by John Trumbull - in which our compatriot with less of wit and ribaldry, but equal smoothness, and rhythmic zest, did so catch the humor of the Butler work in many of his couplets that even now they pass muster as veritable parts of Hudibras.*

Samuel Butler was the son of a farmer, over in the pretty Worcestershire region of England; but there was in him little sense of charming ruralities; they never put their treasures into his verse. For sometime he was in the household of one of Cromwell's generals,† who lived in a stately country-hall

Some of the couplets in the two ran so nearly together as almost to collide. Thus, Butler says:

"He that runs may fight again,

Which he can never do that's slain."

While Trumbull's couplet runs thus :

"He that fights and runs away

May live to fight another day."

This was Sir Samuel Luke of Cople-Wood-End, a Parlia mentary leader and a man of probity and distinction, sup. posed to have been the particular subject of Butler's lam

a little way out of Bedford; again, he filled some dependency at that stately Ludlow Castle on the bor

ders of Wales - forever associated with the music of Milton's "Comus." It was after the Restoration that he budded out in his anti-Puritan lampoon; but though he pandered to the ruling prejudices of the time, he was not successful in his search for place and emoluments; he quarrelled with those who laughed loudest at his buffoonery and died neglected. His name is to be remembered as that of one of the noticeable men of this epoch, who wrote a poem bristling all through with coarse wit, and whose memory is kept alive more by the stinging couplets which have passed from his pen into common speech than by any high literary merit or true poetic savor. His chief work in verse must be regarded as a happy, witty extravaganza, which caused so riotous a mirth as to be mistaken for valid fame. The poem is a curio of letters- -a specimen of literary bric-à-brac - an old, ingeniously

poon.

His own letter-book, however (Egerton Magazine, cited by John Brown in his recent Life of Bunyan, p. 45) shows him to have been much more a man of the world than was Butler's caricature of a "Colonel."

enamelled snuff-box, with dirty pictures within the lid.

Samuel Pepys.

I had occasion just now to speak of the Pepys Diary, and promised later and further talk about its author, whom we now put in focus, and shall pour what light we can upon him.*

He was a man of fair personal appearance and great self-approval, the son of a well-to-do London tailor, and fairly educated; but the most piquant memorial of his life at Cambridge University is the "admonition "— which is of record - of his having

been on one occasion "scandalously over-served with drink." In his after life in London he escaped the admonitions; but not wholly the "overservice" in ways of eating and drinking.

Pepys was a not far-off kinsman of Lord Sandwich (whom he strongly resembled), and it was through

*Samuel Pepys - whom those well up in cockney ways of speech persist in calling "Mr. Peps" was born 1633; died 1703. His Diary, running from 1660 to 1669, did not see the light until 1825. Since that date numerous editions have been published; that of Bright, the best. See also Wheatley, Samuel Pepys and the World he lived in.

that dignitary's influence that he ultimately came into a very good position in connection with the Admiralty, where he was most intrepid in his examination of tar and cordage, and brought such close scrutiny to his duties as to make him an admirable official in the Naval Department under Charles II. For this service, however, he would never have been heard of, any more than another straightforward, plodding clerk; nor would he have been heard of for his book about naval matters, which you will hardly find in any library in the country. But he did write a Diary, which you will find everywhere.

It is a Diary which, beginning in 1660, the first of Charles' reign, covers the ten important succeeding years; within which he saw regicides hung and quartered, and heard the guns of terrific naval battles with the Dutch, and braved all the horrors of the Great Plague from the day when he first saw house-doors with a red cross marked on them, and the words "Lord, have mercy on us!" to the time when ten thousand died in a week, and "little noise was heard, day or night, but tolling of bells." Page after page of his Diary is also given to the great fire of the following year- from the Sunday night

when he was waked by his maid to see a big light on the back side of Mark Lane, to the following Thursday when two-thirds of the houses and of the churches of London were in ashes.

-

never

But Pepys' Diary is not so valued for its story of great events as for its daily setting down of little unimportant things-of the plays which he saw acted-of the dust that fell on the theatre-goers from the galleries of what he bought, and what he conjectured, and what his wife said to him, and what new dresses she had, and how he slept comfortably through the sermon of Dr. So-and-So -just as you and I might have done having a thought either that his Diary would ever be printed. He wrote it, in fact, in a blind short-hand, which made it lie unnoticed and undetected for a great many years, until at last some prying Cambridge man unriddled his cipher and wrote out and published Pepys' Diary to the world. And it is delightful; it is so true and honest, and straightforward, and gossipy; and it throws more light upon the every-day life in London in those days of the Restoration than all the other books ever written.