in avowed imitation of Hudibras. The Dutch Hudibras is a satirical account of the birth, parentage, and education of Hogan, the _lubberly representative of their High Mightinesses. Bating the metre, it is rather an imitation of Rabelais than of Butler; and, if it does not rival the humour, it certainly does not fall short of the outrageous absurdities of its great prototype.

The Irish Hudibras, or Fingallian Prince, is a burlesque on Virgil's account of the descent of Æneas to Hell, and is levelled at the Irish adherents of James II. If not the most dull, it may claim the distinction of being the most scurrilous of the imitations of Hudibras. In addition to its being plentifully sprinkled with hibernicisms, it is so systematically gross, that we are afraid to pollute our pages with any extracts from such a filthy work.

We shall next notice, in defiance of chronology, Moffett's Irish Hudibras, which has much more merit, if not more decency, than its scurrilous predecessor. It is little more than a description of an Irish feast, given by a zealous Jacobite, and the customary row that attends it; the incidents of which are detailed with considerable spirit, but at too great a length to be extracted.

Colvil's Scotch Hudibras turns upon the insurrection of the Covenanters in Scotland, in the reign of Charles II., and describes, at great length, the mental and bodily endowments of The Good-man, their leader or representative. The action of the poem consists in deciding on and presenting a supplication to the king, which is delivered by the hero's squire, (another Ralpho in every thing but wit,) who makes a pilgrimage to London for that purpose. He there falls in with the original Ralpho, with whom he commences a dispute, defending Presbytery and Synods from the attacks of the latter, whose speeches are extracted, verbatim, from Hudibras. The poem concludes with the squire's speech to the king, and his farewell to London. This work is decidedly superior to its Hudibrastic brethren, and possesses a considerable share of originality and spirit, though not enough to rescue it from the charge of dulness and tedium. It has hardly the semblance of a story, and the juxta-position of almost every sentence might be changed without any obvious injury to the composition.

"All things created, he doth know,

In heav'n above, and earth below:
He solves the questions ev'ry one,
'That Sheba's Queen ask'd Solomon ;
Or any other knotty doubt

That can occur the world throughout.
VOL. III. PART II.

Z

He knows whether the Great Mogul
Doth drink out of his father's skull;
If ichneumon and crocodile
Do fight in Niger as in Nile?
Or if we ought to believe them,
Who say Melchisedec was not Shem?
Which raised once a fisty strife
Between a preacher and his wife.
If Rome's founders wolves did suck?
If Job in Edom was a duke?

If Captain Hynd was a good fellow?
If Wallace' beard was black or yellow?
If roasted eggs be best, or sodden?

If James the Fourth was kill'd at Flodden
If once he level at the moon,

Either at midnight or at noon,
He discovers rivers, hills,
Steeples, castles, and wind-mills,
Villages and fenced towns,

With fusees, bulwarks, and great guns :
Cavaliers on horse-back prancing,
Maids about a May-pole dancing,
Men in taverns wine carousing,
Beggars by the high-way lousing,
Soldiers forging ale-house brawlings
To be let go without their lawings:
Stirs in streets by grooms and pages,
Mountebanks playing on stages,
Gardens planting, houses bigging,
States and princes fleets out rigging:
Antic fashions of apparels,

Mates and princes picking quarrels:

Wars, rebels, and horse-races

Proclaim'd at sev'ral market places:

Captors bringing in their prizes,

Commons cursing new excises:

Young wives their old husbands horning,
Judges drunken ev'ry morning,
Augmenting law suits and divisions
By Spanish and by French decisions:
Courtiers their aims missing,

Chaplains widow-ladies kissing:
Men to sell their lands itching,

Frequent changes, states invading,
Pulpits forcing and persuading,
Great jars for cloves and maces,

For bishops, lordships, and their graces :
Preachers contradicting fast

This year what they preach'd the last;
Making in their conscience room,

For a change the year to come."

Scotch Hudibras.

We shall give a short specimen of Hudibrastic logic.

"Though things agree to both together,

It follows not the one's the other.
Affirmatives in second figure,
Nothing conclude in logic's leaguer,
Which any constant man believes,
So we may prove financiers thieves,
Cameleons beef and cabbage eaters,
And lawyers and physicians-cheaters;
That horse are men, and owls are ounces,
That privy-counsellors are dunces;
That colleges, and muses' caverns,
Are *

houses turn'd, and taverns;
That stews are places of contrition,
And pulpits, trumpets of sedition;
And Merlin's prophecies evangels,
And Dee's spirits holy angels;
That roasted wild-cat is a fed lamb,
That Gresham college is a bedlam;
Most of our first reformers bad men,

And all the House of Commons mad men;
That tallow-cakes are ambergrease,

That sun and moon are Cheshire cheese;

And Whigs as loyal in opinions,

As any of the King's dominions."

Scotch Hudibras.

Pendragon, or the Carpet Knight, is a satire on that active and mercenary writer in the cause of arbitrary power, Sir Roger L'Estrange, who is described as

"A pliant tool, oblig'd with knighthood

And large rewards, he was excited
To serve the times through all excesses,
And on foul deeds to put fair faces,

Until he grew to be the great
Prevaricator of the state:

Thus all true Englishmen he found,
Pendragon with his pen dragoon'd."

The principal incidents in the poem arise from Pendragon's courtship of a lively damsel, who finally jilts him. This takes place on the eve of the Revolution, and the tale ends with the landing of King William, and Pendragon's dismay, and devices to secure his neck. This work is not destitute of humour, but it contains no very extractable passages, unless at greater length than we can afford, or than the book deserves.

The Dissenting Hypocrite is a very abusive and very impotent attack on Defoe. The author has very prudently told us at the head of his title page, that the work was written "in imitation of Hudibras," or we should not have suspected him of any such intention.

We now come to the productions of a very voluminous writer, but a very sorry imitator of Butler, the notorious Ned Ward, an industrious retailer of ale and scurrility. We shall not meddle with his London Spy, a coarse, but tolerably faithful portraiture of London manners, or with his horrible version of Don Quixote. The works which bring him more immediately under our notice, are his British Hudibras and his Hudibras Redivivus. The subject of the former, is the burning of Daniel Burgess's chapel by the Mob, and the conflicts and dissentions which attended it. Hudibras Redivivus is a violent satire on the Low Church party, and obtained for its author an elevavation to the pillory. It is a desultory and unconnected work, and is made up of the author's meditations in his rambles about town, and of descriptions of the scenes of low mirth, hypocrisy, and profaneness, which he witnessed in his perambulations. Books, and booksellers' shops; Daniel Defoe; astrologers; meeting-houses of puritans and quakers, with their sermons and speeches; taverns, and tavern disputes; allegorical dreams; quacks and merry-andrews; Bartholomew-fair; the lord mayor's show; the fifth of November; and calves-head day; form the motley subjects of the twenty-four cantos, connected only by the spirit of party abuse, to which they are all made subservient. Ward, however, possesses a vein of low humour, and his descriptions of scenes and manners, though tediously diffuse, indicate considerable shrewdness of observation, and have a strong appearance of truth and reality. The following is a description of a Puritanic meeting.

"A throng of searchers after truth,
Were crowding at the Alley's mouth,

Wherein the conventicle stood,

Like Smithfield droll-booth, built with wood; All shoving to obtain admittance,

As if they hop'd for full acquittance

Of all the evils they had done,

From that time back to forty-one:

Some wrapt in cloaks that had been wore
By saints defunct, in times of yore:
Others in coats, which by their fashion
Bore date from Charles's restauration,
Shelter'd beneath umbrella hats,

And canoniz'd with rose cravats,

That by their querpos and their quaints,
The world might read them to be saints;
Their sweaty rat-tail hair hung down
To th' shoulders from each addled crown,
Kept thin, to cool their frantick brains,
And comb'd as straight as horses' manes;
Their bodies almost skeletons,

Reduc'd by zeal to skin and bones,
So lean and envious in the face,
As if they'd neither grease nor grace.
The good old dames, among the rest,
Were all most primitively drest
In stiffen-body'd russet gowns,
And on their heads old steeple crowns ;
With pristine pinners next their faces,
Edg'd round with ancient scollop laces,
Such as my antiquary says,
Were worn in old Queen Bess's days,
In ruffs, and fifty other ways:

Their wrinkl'd necks were cover'd o'er,
With whisks of lawn by grannums wore,
In base contempt of bishops' sleeves,
As Simon Orthodox believes.

At length up stepp'd the formal prater,
Who was of country May-pole stature,
Slender, stiff-neck'd, extremely tall,
Long-faced, and very thin withal.
No sooner had old Heart-of-Oak,
Upon a peg hung hat and cloak,
But round their sockets did he rowl
The little windows of his soul;
But soon we found his eye-balls hid,
Turn'd up beneath each upper lid,