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
(190721).
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 poets 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, 493502.
[
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
©
19932020
Bartleby.com
· [
Top 150
] ·
Subjects
·
Titles
·
Authors
·
World Lit
·
Free Essays