Near this place lies interred
The body of Mr. Samuel Butler,
Author of Hudibras. 
He was a whole species of Poets in one! 
Admirable in a Manner
In which no one else has been tolerable;
A Manner which began and ended in Him;
In which he knew no Guide,
And has found no Followers.[315]

To this too brief article I add a proof that that fanaticism which is branded by our immortal Butler can survive the castigation.  Folly is sometimes immortal, as nonsense is sometimes irrefutable.  Ancient follies revive, and men repeat the same unintelligible jargon:  just as contagion keeps up the plague in Turkey by lying hid in some obscure corner, till it breaks out afresh.  Recently we have seen a notable instance where one of the school to which we are alluding declares of Shakspeare that “it would have been happy if he had never been born, for that thousands will look back with incessant anguish on the guilty delight which the plays of Shakspeare ministered to them."[316] Such is the anathema of Shakspeare!  We have another of Butler, in “An Historic Defence of Experimental Religion;” in which the author contends, that the best men have experienced the agency of the Holy Spirit in an immediate illumination from heaven.  He furnishes his historic proofs by a list from Abel to Lady Huntingdon!  The author of Hudibras is denounced, “One Samuel Butler, a celebrated buffoon in the abandoned reign of Charles the Second, wrote a mock-heroic poem, in which he undertook to burlesque the pious puritan.  He ridicules all the gracious promises by comparing the divine illumination to an ignis fatuus, and dark lantern of the spirit."[317] Such are the writers whose ascetic spirit is still descending among us from the monkery of the deserts, adding poignancy to the very ridicule they would annihilate.  The satire which we deemed obsolete, we find still applicable to contemporaries!

The FIRST part of Hudibras is the most perfect; that was the rich fruit of matured meditation, of wit, of learning, and of leisure.  A mind of the most original powers had been perpetually acted on by some of the most extraordinary events and persons of political and religious history.  Butler had lived amidst scenes which might have excited indignation and grief; but his strong contempt of the actors could only supply ludicrous images and caustic raillery.  Yet once, when villany was at its zenith, his solemn tones were raised to reach it.[318]

The SECOND part was precipitated in the following year.  An interval of fourteen years was allowed to elapse before the THIRD and last part was given to the world; but then everything had changed! the poet, the subject, and the patron!  The old theme of the sectarists had lost its freshness, and the cavaliers, with their royal libertine, had become as obnoxious to public decency as the Tartuffes.  Butler appears to have turned aside, and to have given an adverse direction to his satirical arrows.