Hudibras speaking of men fighting with an unworthy enemy, says:—­

  “So th’ Emperor Caligula
   That triumphed o’er the British sea,
   Took crabs and oysters prisoners,
   And lobsters ’stead of cuirassiers;
   Engaged his legions in fierce bustles
   With periwinkles, prawns, and mussels,
   And led his troops with furious gallops
   To charge whole regiments of scallops;
   Not like their ancient way of war,
   To wait on his triumphal car;
   But, when he went to dine or sup,
   More bravely ate his captives up.”

Butler begins one canto with

  “Ah me! what perils do environ
   The man that meddles with cold iron.”

His political views are seen in the following: 

  “For as a fly that goes to bed
   Rests with its tail above its head,
   So in this mongrel state of ours
   The rabble are the supreme powers. 
   That horsed us on their backs to show us
   A jadish trick at last, and throw us.”

Several minor poems have been attributed to Butler, but most of them have been considered spurious.  Some, however, are admitted—­one of which is a humorous skit against the Royal Society, who were supposed at that day to be too minutely subtle.  It is called “An Elephant in the Moon.”  “Some learned astronomers think they have made a great discovery, but it is really owing to a mouse and some gnats having got into their telescope.”

The light, short metre in which Butler composed his comic narrative was well suited to the subject, and corresponded to the “swift iambics” of Archilochus.  Dryden says that double rhymes are necessary companions of burlesque writing.  Addison, however, is of opinion that Hudibras “would have made a much more agreeable figure in heroics,” to which Cowden Clarke replies, “Why, bless his head! the whole and sole intention of the poem is mock heroic, and the structure of the verse is burlesque,” and he also tells us that Butler’s rhymes constitute one feature of his wit.  Certainly he had some strange terminations to his lines.  Hudibras speaking of hanging Sidrophel and Whackum says:—­

  “I’ll make them serve for perpendiclars
   As true as e’er were used by bricklayers.”

One of the bear-baiting mob annoys Rapho’s steed, who

  “Began to kick, and fling, and wince,
   As if he’d been beside his sense,
   Striving to disengage from thistle
   That gall’d him sorely under his tail.”

Again we have:—­

  “An ancient castle that commands
   Th’ adjacent parts, in all the fabric
   You shall not see one stone, nor a brick.”

The astrologers made an instrument to examine the moon to

  “Tell what her diameter per inch is;
   And prove that she’s not made of green cheese.”

By the interchange which often takes place between the poetical and ludicrous, this roughness of versification, then allowable, appears now so childish, that Lamb and Cowden Clark mistook it for humour.  But we might extract from the writers of that day many ridiculous rhymes, evidently intended to be serious.