Hudibras, in Three Parts, Written in the Time of the Late Wars

Name: Hudibras, in Three Parts, Written in the Time of the Late Wars
Author: Samuel Butler

by Samuel Butler

Pages: about 327
Category: Literature & Fiction
Language: English
Reading time: 6 h at 250 wpm

Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 3.3 h at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

THE TIME OF THE LATE WARS --------------------- BY SAMUEL BUTLER, ESQ. --------------------- WITH ANNOTATIONS AND AN INDEX ------
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]
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.]
The Author of this celebrated Poem was of this his last composition: for although he had not the happiness of an academical education, as some affirm, if may be perceived, throughout his whole Poem, that he had read much, and was very well accomplished in the most useful parts of human learning.

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Hudibras, in Three Parts, Written in the Time of the Late Wars

From the opening

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