Layout:  the line numbers all end in col. 65.  View this e-text in a monospaced font such as Courier and they will all line up in the right margin.

Latin:  All translations are by the transcriber.  In the notes, they immediately follow the Latin text in [square brackets].  Translations of Latin phrases in the poem are in the glossary.  Disclaimer:  these translations are probably very inaccurate — I am no great Latin scholar.

Hudibras
in
three parts

Writtenin

The time of the late wars
---------------------
by Samuel Butler, Esq.
---------------------
With
annotations
and
an index
------

TO THE READER.

Poeta nascitur non fit, [poets are born, not made] is a sentence of as great truth as antiquity; it being most certain, that all the acquired learning imaginable is insufficient to compleat a poet, without a natural genius and propensity to so noble and sublime an art.  And we may, without offence, observe, that many very learned men, who have been ambitious to be thought poets, have only rendered themselves obnoxious to that satyrical inspiration our Author wittily invokes: 

Which made them, though it were in spight
Of nature and their stars, to write.

On the one side some who have had very little human learning, but were endued with a large share of natural wit and parts, have become the most celebrated (Shakespear, D’Avenant, &c.) poets of the age they lived in.  But, as these last are, “Rarae aves in terris,” so, when the muses have not disdained the assistances of other arts and sciences, we are then blessed with those lasting monuments of wit and learning, which may justly claim a kind of eternity upon earth.  And our author, had his modesty permitted him, might, with Horace, have said,

Exegi monumentum aere perennius: 
[I have raised a memorial more lasting than bronze]

Or, with Ovid,

Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira, nec ignis,
Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas.
[For I have raised a work which neither the rage of Jupiter,
Nor fire, nor iron, nor consuming age can destroy.]