Charles Butler, a country parson of a small village in Hampshire, wrote introductory textbooks for pupils at grammar school or university. His most famous textbook was the Rhetoricæ Libri Dvo (Two Books of Rhetoric, 1598), an annotated edition of Rhetorica (Rhetoric, 1548), the famous work of Omer Talon (known as Audomarus Talaeus), but he also wrote schoolbooks on grammar and music, as well as treatises for adult readers. Modern critics have not always been kind to Butler, finding his works intellectually and aesthetically unsatisfying. He is often criticized as being a dilettante or a gifted amateur. For example, Walter J. Ong says, in his Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue; from the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958), that Butler "was famed not as a seriously scientific logician or philosopher but as an author of preparatory-school textbooks in rhetoric." Occasionally, he is ridiculed for his idiosyncratic...