grotesque sides came uppermost.  Butler’s hero is a Presbyterian justice of the peace who sallies forth with his secretary, Ralpho—­an Independent and Anabaptist-like Don Quixote with Sancho Panza, to suppress May games and bear-baitings. (Macaulay, it will be remembered, said that the Puritans disapproved of bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.) The humor of Hudibras is not of the finest.  The knight and the squire are discomfited in broadly comic adventures, hardly removed from the rough physical drolleries of a pantomime or circus.  The deep heart-laughter of Cervantes, the pathos on which his humor rests, is, of course, not to be looked for in Butler.  But he had wit of a sharp, logical kind, and his style surprises with all manner of verbal antics.  He is almost as great a phrase-master as Pope, though in a coarser kind.  His verse is a smart doggerel, and his poem has furnished many stock sayings, as for example,

  ’Tis strange what difference there can be
  ’Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.

Hudibras has had many imitators, not the least successful of whom was the American John Trumbull, in his revolutionary satire, M’Fingal, some couplets of which are generally quoted as Butler’s, as, for example,

  No man e’er felt the halter draw
  With good opinion of the law.

The rebound against Puritanism is seen no less plainly in the drama of the Restoration, and the stage now took vengeance for its enforced silence under the Protectorate.  Two theaters were opened under the patronage, respectively, of the king and of his brother, the Duke of York.  The manager of the latter, Sir William Davenant—­who had fought on the king’s side, been knighted for his services, escaped to France, and was afterward captured and imprisoned in England for two years—­had managed to evade the law against stage plays as early as 1656, by presenting his Siege of Rhodes as an “opera,” with instrumental music and dialogue in recitative, after a fashion newly sprung up in Italy.  This he brought out again in 1661, with the dialogue recast into riming couplets in the French fashion.  Movable painted scenery was now introduced from France, and actresses took the female parts formerly played by boys.  This last innovation was said to be at the request of the king, one of whose mistresses, the famous Nell Gwynne, was the favorite actress at the King’s Theater.

Upon the stage, thus reconstructed, the so-called “classical” rules of the French theater were followed, at least in theory.  The Louis XIV. writers were not purely creative, like Shakspere or his contemporaries in England, but critical and self-conscious.  The Academy had been formed in 1636 for the preservation of the purity of the French language, and discussion abounded on the principles and methods of literary art.  Corneille not only wrote tragedies, but essays on tragedy, and one in particular on the Three