HUDIBRAS; IN THREE PARTS: WRITTEN IN THE TIME Of the LATE WARS BY SAMUEL BUTLER, ESQ. WITH A LIFE OF The author, ANNOTATIONS, AND AN INDEX. HARTFORD: S. ANDRUS AND SON. 1846.. TO THE READER. POETA nascitur non fit, is a sentence of as great truth as antiquity; it being most certain, that all the acquired learning imaginable is insufficient to complete a poet, without a natural genious 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 satirical inspiration our author wittily invokes : Which made them, though it were in spite 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* poets of the age they lived in. But as these last are 'Rare 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 ære perennius: Or, with Ovid, Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira, nec ignis, The author of this celebrated poem was of this last composition: for although he had not the happiness of an academical education, as some affirm, it 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. Rapin, in his reflections, speaking of the necessary qualities belonging to a poet, tells us, Shakspeare, Davenant, &c |