Samuel Butler (1612-1680) (Cyclopedia of World Authors)
Samuel Butler is remembered chiefly as the author of one of the outstanding satires of the seventeenth century. Hudibras, a rollicking burlesque on the followers of Oliver Cromwell, was written as a mock-heroic poem to ridicule the Puritans who had controlled England for two decades. Part of the poem’s charm lies in its comic rhyming of couplets. The central figure of the work, which is thematically similar to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), is Hudibras, a “presbyterian true blue” knight, and the poem describes the attempt of this knight and his odd...
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