Select Search World Factbook Roget's Int'l Thesaurus Bartlett's Quotations Respectfully Quoted Fowler's King's English Strunk's Style Mencken's Language Cambridge History The King James Bible Oxford Shakespeare Gray's Anatomy Farmer's Cookbook Post's Etiquette Brewer's Phrase & Fable Bulfinch's Mythology Frazer's Golden Bough All Verse Anthologies Dickinson, E. Eliot, T.S. Frost, R. Hopkins, G.M. Keats, J. Lawrence, D.H. Masters, E.L. Sandburg, C. Sassoon, S. Whitman, W. Wordsworth, W. Yeats, W.B. All Nonfiction Harvard Classics American Essays Einstein's Relativity Grant, U.S. Roosevelt, T. Wells's History Presidential Inaugurals All Fiction Shelf of Fiction Ghost Stories Short Stories Shaw, G.B. Stein, G. Stevenson, R.L. Wells, H.G. Reference > Cambridge History > The Age of Dryden > Samuel Butler > His Learning in Letters and Law   Penury of his Later Days Imitations of his Prose and Verse: The Posthumous Works   CONTENTS · VOLUME CONTENTS · INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). Volume VIII. The Age of Dryden. II. Samuel Butler. § 6. His Learning in Letters and Law. We have seen that he was well taught in Latin and Greek; but we learn from one of his Contradictions that he gave up his Greek studies after he had left school as “unnecessary except to Dunces and Schoolmasters,” and, in his Thoughts on Learning and Knowledge, 5  he repeats that Greek is “of little use in our times unless to serve Pedants and mountebanks to smatter withal”; there is, however, considerable evidence that he kept up his Latin, especially in the satirists Horace, Juvenal and Persius, from whom he derives many thoughts and similes; Lucan, also, he parodies in a notable passage. 6  In his prose writings (Reflections, etc.) he shows that he had read Lucretius carefully; he employs that poet’s language in illustrating remarks aimed at the newly formed Royal Society or, as they were styled, the “Virtuosi of Gresham College.” He freely showers ridicule on Sir Paul Neale, probably the original of the astrologer Sidrophel (perhaps a parody of “Astrophil”) and on Lord Brounker, president of the Society, who, in the poem entitled The Elephant in the Moon, is dubbed “Virtuoso in chief.”   9   A knowledge of English law and legal phraseology is conspicuous in his writings, but, as might be expected, it is the technical law appertaining to the office of a justice of the peace rather than that of a constitutional lawyer, though his intercourse with Selden may have procured for him some acquaintance with that department of legal study.   10 Note 5. p. 280 (ed. 1908). [ back ] Note 6. I, 2, 493–502. [ back ] CONTENTS · VOLUME CONTENTS · INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD   Penury of his Later Days Imitations of his Prose and Verse: The Posthumous Works     Shakespeare · Bible · Strunk · Anatomy · Nonfiction · Quotations · Reference · Fiction · Poetry © 1993–2015 Bartleby.com · [Top 150] · Subjects · Titles · Authors · World Lit.