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ON THE MONUMENT TO BUTLER'S MEMORY,

ERECTED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.23

WHEN Butler, needy wretch! was still alive,
No gen'rous patron would a dinner give:
See him, when starved to death, and turn'd to dust,
Presented with a monumental bust!

The poet's fate is here in emblem shown;

He ask'd for bread, and he received a stone.

composing songs seemed to be his chief talent, which he would do to the most difficult tunes: for his words were not, as other poets' were, set to music, but he made words to the music." From his wit and facetious conversation, as well as for his talent in singing his own songs, he was a welcome guest at the tables of the great; and Charles II., William, and Queen Anne, were often delighted by his merry sprightly humours. From the latter he is said to have received fifty guineas for singing a song to her, written to ridicule the Princess Sophia, Electress Dowager of Hanover, which began:

"The crown is too weighty
For shoulders of eighty."

23 Butler is said to have died in great poverty. His immortal poem "Hudibras' is one of those compositions of which a nation may justly boast; as the images which it exhibits are domestic, the sentiments unborrowed and unexpected, and the strain of diction original and peculiar." "The original idea of 'Hudibras' is to be found in the history of 'Don Quixote,' a book to which a mind of the greatest powers may be indebted without disgrace."-Dr. S. Johnson.

ON RICHARD BRANDON, THE EXECUTIONER OF CHARLES I.24

WHO, do you think, lies buried here?
One that did help to make hemp dear;
The poorest subject did abhor him,

And yet his king did kneel before him;
He would his master not betroy,
Yet he his master did destroy;

And yet no Judas: in records 'tis found
Judas had thirty pence, he thirty pound.25

24 Brandon died in 1649, and was buried in Whitechapel churchyard. The Burial Register has the following entry, under 1649: "June 21st, Richard Brandon, a man out of Rosemary Lane. This R. Brandon is supposed to have cut off the head of Charles Ist." Brandon at the time was the official executioner for the city of London. He inherited the office from his father, and was succeeded in it by Dunn, who is mentioned in Hudibras, and in a royalist epigram on the death of Hugh Peters. The scaffold was raised in front of the Banqueting House, Whitehall. It was graced on the day of Charles's decapitation by two masked executioners; and as to the one who used the axe a question has arisen, who was he? Immediately after the Restoration, the Government made an effort to discover the masked headsman; but we do not learn that they ever succeeded. See, on this subject, "Notes and Queries," and Chambers's "Book of Days." 25 The fee (30%.) was said to have been paid in crown pieces.

ON ARCHBISHOP LAUD,26 BEHEADED JAN. 1645. HERE lies, within the compass of this earth, A man of boundless pride, of meanest birth; England's last Primate, whose unequal fate Made him the prince's love, the people's hate. A Protestant in show, yet, join'd by art, An English head-piece to a Roman heart; A seeming patriot, yet this wonder bred, He was the Church's, his a traitor's head, Which being taken off, he thus did die, The Church's, Prince's, People's enemy.

From an old MS. in Sion College Library.

26"Of all the prelates of the Anglican Church, Laud had departed farthest from the principles of the Reformation, and had drawn nearest to Rome." "His passion for ceremonies, his reverence for holidays, vigils, and sacred places, his illconcealed dislike of the marriage of ecclesiastics, would have made him an object of aversion to the Puritans, even if he had used only legal and gentle means for the attainment of his ends. But his understanding was narrow; and his commerce with the world had been small. He was by nature rash, irritable, quick to feel for his own dignity, slow to sympathize with the sufferings of others, and prone to the error, common in superstitious men, of mistaking his own peevish and malignant moods for emotions of pious zeal."-Lord Macaulay's History of England.

He was generally regarded, when Archbishop, as the prime minister and adviser of Charles I. in all his mad schemes of oppression, tyranny, and cruelty. The end of his intolerable reign of fury, bigotry, and superstition, speedily arrived, how

ON THOMAS HOBBES."7

HERE lies Tom Hobbes, the bugbear of the nation,
Whose death hath frighted Atheism out of fashion.

HERE lies the Great-False marble, tell me where?
Nothing but poor and sordid dust lies here.

Cowley.

ever; on the breaking out of the Revolution, his palace was assaulted by the mob; and, in 1640, he was impeached by the House of Commons and sent to the Tower. In 1644 the House passed an Act of attainder against him, which the Lords were compelled to affirm; and he was beheaded on Tower Hill shortly after his trial. See Heylyn's "Life of Laud."

"His bigotry and cruelty in the execution of his high office ought assuredly not to have gone unpunished; but the sentence against him was, perhaps, the most unjustifiable act of the zealots of the Long Parliament; and it appears strongly one of the disadvantages of government by a large assembly of men; for the odium of the death of Laud being divided among so many, has neither brought with it individual infamy, nor was likely to produce individual remorse."-Westminster Review, vol. xvii.

27 His great work was the "Leviathan; or, the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical," censured by Parliament as atheistical, and considered to have had more influence than any other work of the kind in spreading infidelity and irreligion, though perhaps not directly levelled against revealed religion. The philosophy of Hobbes has been more or less adopted by Locke, Hume, Hartley, and Priestley. He successfully applies Lord Bacon's inductive me

ON COWLEY, BY HIMSELF.28

Translated by Addison.

FROM life's superfluous cares enlarged,
His debt of human toil discharged,
Here Cowley lies! beneath this shed
To every worldly interest dead;
With decent poverty content,
His hours of ease not idly spent ;
To fortune's good a foe profest,
And hating wealth by all carest.
'Tis true he's dead; for, oh! how small
A spot of earth is now his all;

Oh! wish that earth may lightly lay,

And every care be far away;

Bring flowers; the short-lived roses bring,

To life deceased fit offering:

And sweets around the poet strow,

While yet with life his ashes glow.

JACOBITE EPITAPHS. ON MARY, WIFE OF
WILLIAM III.29

I.

HERE ends, notwithstanding her specious pretences, The undutiful child of the kindest of princes.

thod of reasoning to the investigation of mental philosophy. See Farrar's Bampton Lectures, "Critical History of Free Thought."

28 The poems of Cowley, whom Dr. Johnson places at the

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