SOURCE: "Two Radical Royalists," and "Samuel Butler (1613-80)," in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill: Writing and Revolution in 17th Century England, Vol. 1, The Harvester Press, 1985, pp. 275-97.

In the following essay, Hill discusses the major themes of Butler's Hudibras and the critical reception that this epic, which "is more quoted than read," has received since its publication.

Hudibras is more quoted than read. Butler had a magnificent gift of phrase, and no power of construction whatsoever. He jotted down lines of verse as they occurred to him, incorporating them later in a new canto of Hudibras or some other poem: many of these fragments he never published. The brief prose Characters show him at his best, and the passages from his notebooks which have been published contain a series of isolated and thought-provoking epigrams. But there are long tracts of Hudibras which are of the greatest tedium...