Page:Hudibras - Volume 1 (Butler, Nash, Bohn; 1859).djvu/41

Rh upon Littleton, with no other object than to impress strongly on his mind the sense of that author; and written in Norman, to familiarize himself with the barbarous language in which the learning of the common law of England was at that period almost uniformly expressed.

"As another instance of the poet's great industry, I have a French dictionary, compiled and transcribed by him: thus our ancestors, with great labour, drew truth and learning out of deep wells, whereas our modern scholars only skim the surface, and pilfer a superficial knowledge from encyclopaedias and reviews. It doth not appear that he ever wrote for the stage, though I have, in his MS. common-place book, part of an unfinished tragedy, entitled Nero."

Concerning Hudibras there is but one sentiment. The admirable fecundity of wit, and the infinite variety of knowledge, displayed throughout the poem have been universally admitted. Dr Johnson well expresses the general sense of all its readers when he says, "If Inexhaustible wit could give perpetual pleasure, no eye would ever leave half read the work of Butler; for what poet has ever brought so many remote images so happily together? It is scarcely possible to peruse a page without finding some association of images that was never found before. By the first paragraph the reader is amused, by the next he is delighted, and by a few more strained to astonishment; but astonishment is a toilsome pleasure; he is soon weary of wondering, and longs to be diverted." And he adds, "Imagination is useless without knowledge; nature gives in vain the power of combination, unless study and observation supply materials to be combined. Butler's treasures of knowledge appear proportioned to his experience: whatever topic employs his mind, he shows himself qualified to expand and illustrate it with all the accessaries that books can furnish: he is found not only to have travelled the beaten road, but the by-paths of literature; not only to have taken general surveys, but to have examined particulars with minute inspection."

Various have been the attempts to define or describe the wit and humour of this celebrated poem; the greatest English writers have tried in vain, Cowley, Barrow, Dryden,