BY SAMUEL BUTLER WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY LL.D., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT THIRD EDITION LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL GLASGOW, MANCHESTER, AND NEW YORK 1889 MORLEY'S UNIVERSAL LIBRARY. 5. Rabelais' Gargantua and the Heroic Deeds of Pantagruel. 6. Machiavelli's Prince. 7. Bacon's Essays. 8. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. 9. Locke on Civil Government and Filmer's "Patriarcha." 1447 10. Butler's Analogy of Religion. II. Dryden's Virgil. 12. Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft. 13. Herrick's Hesperides. 14. Coleridge's Table-Talk. 15. Boccaccio's Decameron. 16. Sterne's Tristram Shandy. 17. Chapman's Homer's Iliad. 18. Medieval Tales. 19. Voltaire's Candide, and Johnson's Rasselas. 20. Jonson's Plays and Poems. 21. Hobbes's Leviathan. 22. Samuel Butler's Hudibras. 23. Ideal Commonwealths. 24. Cavendish's Life of Wolsey. 25 & 26. Don Quixote. 27. Burlesque Plays and Poems. 28. Dante's Divine Comedy. LONGFELLOw's Translation. 29. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, Plays, and Poems. 30. Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit. (Hitopadesa.) 31. Lamb's Essays of Elia. 32. The History of Thomas Ellwood. 33. Emerson's Essays, &c. 34. Southey's Life of Nelson. 35. De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium-Eater, &c. 36. Stories of Ireland. By Miss EDGEWORTH. 37. Frere's Aristophanes: Acharnians, Knights, Birds. 38. Burke's Speeches and Letters. 39. Thomas à Kempis. 40. Popular Songs of Ireland. 41. Potter's Eschylus. 42. Goethe's Faust: Part II. ANSTER'S Translation. 43. Famous Pamphlets. 44. Francklin's Sophocles. 45. M. G. Lewis's Tales of Terror and Wonder. 46. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. 47. Drayton's Barons' Wars, Nymphidia, &c. 48. Cobbett's Advice to Young Men. "Marvels of clear type and general neatness."-Daily Telegraph. INTRODUCTION. He was SAMUEL BUTLER was born in February, 1612, and was baptized on the 8th of February, according to the parish registers kept by his father, who rented a farm in Worcestershire, in the parish of Strensham. Samuel, named after his father, was the fifth child in a family of seven. educated in the Worcester College School, and passed from school, probably after some training in an attorney's office, into employment as clerk to a Justice of the Peace, Mr. Thomas Jefferies, of Earl's Croome, near Strensham. Butler's genius gave him already the tastes of an artist and a scholar. He made pictures, and he compiled for himself, as aid to his private studies, a French dictionary, and an abridgment, in Law French, of Coke upon Littleton. From the service of Mr. Jefferies, Butler passed into that of the Earl of Kent, at Wrest, in Bedfordshire. Henry Lord Grey de Ruthin, in 1625, succeeded his brother in the Earldom of Kent. The estates of his earldom were entangled among lawsuits that raised questions of title, and gave large employment to Selden's powers of research. The Earl had wisely chosen in John Selden the one man in all England who was best able to help him. Selden was much at Wrest; and Butler was probably engaged to live at Wrest as a quick-witted clerk employed under Selden's direction. Anthony à Wood says that Butler often wrote letters beyond sea for Selden, and translated for him. It was education to work under so true a scholar, and there was a large library at Wrest from which Butler could gather some part of that store of knowledge, wittily applied, which gives strength to his satire. Good service at Wrest probably was Butler's recommendation, when he had finished his work there, to another |