Lectures on English Poets

Neither the Understanding nor the Imagination is sane by itself; the one becomes blank worldliness, the other hypochondria. A very little imagination is able to intoxicate a weak understanding, and this appears to be the condition of religious enthusiasm in vulgar minds. Puritanism, as long as it had a material object to look forward to, was strong and healthy. But Fanaticism is always defeated by success; the moment it is established in the repose of power, it necessarily crystallizes into cant and formalism around any slenderest threads of dogma; and if the intellectual fermentation continue after the spiritual has ceased, as it constantly does, it is the fermentation of putrefaction, breeding nothing but the vermin of incoherent and destructively-active metaphysic subtleties -- the maggots, as Butler, condensing Lord Bacon, calls them, of corrupted texts. That wise man Oliver Cromwell has been reproached for desertion of principles because he recognized the truth that though enthusiasm may overturn a government, it can never carry on one. Our Puritan ancestors came to the same conclusion, and have been as unwisely blamed for it. While we wonder at the prophetic imagination of those heroic souls who could see in the little _Mayflower_ the seeds of an empire, while we honor (as it can only truly be honored -- by imitating) that fervor of purpose which could give up everything for principle, let us be thankful that they had also that manly English sense which refused to sacrifice _their_ principles to the fantasy of every wandering Adoniram or Shear-Jashub who mistook himself for Providence as naturally and as obstinately as some lunatics suppose themselves to be tea-pots.

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.