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,

And then he work'd about the whites,
As mad-men do in raving fits;
Reel'd in his tub from side to side,
And wrung his hands as if he cry'd.
His beard from shoul' to shoulder rov'd,
And like the clock-work drummers mov'd;
Thus yawn'd, and gap'd, and gently stirr'd
His head, but yet said ne'er a word;
Made many strange Geneva faces,
And out-did twenty apes' grimaces.
At last his tongue its silence broke,
And thus the rev'rend Spin-text spoke."

Hudibras Redivivus.

The Republican Procession is described by Mr. Hogg (in his Jacobite Reliques) as "a poem of sterling rough humour," and as containing "more humour than any thing of the kind I ever saw." We suspect Mr. Hogg's political zeal had got the upper-hand of his judgment when this eulogium escaped him. The extracts which he has given from this work are remarkable for nothing but outrageous scurrility and vulgar effrontery, and the whole composition is mean, bald, and contemptible. The subject is the Duke of Marlborough's return, after the death of Queen Anne, and the procession which met and welcomed him to the metropolis.* We are unable to find in this Jacobite effusion any passage of merit or interest to lay before our readers. The Hudibrastic Brewer is somewhat of a comment on the preceding work, and quite as dull, though not so abusive.

Four Hudibrastic Cantos turn upon some local scandal, and are of too mediocre a cast to be disturbed in their oblivion.

England's Reformation is an ex-parte history, in doggrel, of the religious dissentions in this country, from the time of Henry VIII. to Titus Oates, written by a bigoted and unscrupulous papist. Thomas Ward has heavier sins than those of coarseness and dulness to answer for, his work being written throughout with an utter disregard of truth, and falsifying or concealing facts, just as it suited the purpose of the author. We hear enough of the sanguinary persecutions of Edward VI. and of that fiend incarnate, Elizabeth, but not a word of the Smithfield burnings of the "good Queen Mary," or of the torturing exploits of the "good Bonner."

*Mr. Hogg very erroneously makes King George the First the hero of this libellous poem, though the personalities against the Duke and his wife are numerous and palpable.

"Good Glo'ster and good Devil are alike,

And both preposterous."

Those readers who can tolerate a work which burlesques martyrdom, and makes merry with executions, will find it not destitute of humour and ingenuity.

The Alma of Prior is avowedly written in imitation of Hu- . dibras, but there are few points of resemblance between the two works. The plan of Butler is sufficiently irregular, but Prior appears to have had no plan at all, nor even an object. The Alma is a mere conversational sketch, which might have been expanded to any length, according to the industry or caprice of the writer. Prior has judiciously abstained from copying the mere superficial peculiarities of Butler, his uncouth versification, and his licentious phraseology; but he wants the matter and substance of his original. Few writers could tell a humourous tale with a more pleasing mixture of archness and simplicity than Mat Prior; but he had neither the keen wit, the sound sense, or the comprehensive learning of Butler. His good things are "thinly scattered to make up a show;" and there is a pervading feeling of poverty in his Alma, which cannot be disguised by the sprightliness of the style and the neatness of the versification.

The Knight of the Kirk, or the Ecclesiastical Adventures of Sir John Presbyter, by Meston,* is a close and tolerably successful imitation of the style of Butler; but, whether from having studied his original so incessantly that he confounded his ideas with his own, or actuated by zealous admiration, like the old woman that stole a bible through the excess of her devotion, the Scottish writer has conveyed ("convey the wise it call," not only thoughts and expressions, but whole lines from his great prototype. He frequently expands a pithy couplet into half a page of doggrel, and dilutes the concentrated spirit of Butler into vapid and mawkish slip-slop. The author of Hudibras certainly did not bequeath him his mantle, but he has managed to pilfer some scraps of it, with which he has patched his thread-bare plaid. Meston, however, is decidedly superior to the common herd of Hudibrastic writers, and his

William Meston was a native of Aberdeenshire: he was born towards the latter end of the seventeenth century, and was educated at the Mareshall College of Aberdeen. Being a sturdy Jacobite, he took an active part in the insurrection of 1715, and after the defeat at Sheriffmuir, was obliged to skulk among the hills and fastnesses till an act of indemnity was published. He afterwards turned schoolmaster, but with little success, and in his latter years he was dependent on the Countess of Errol for support. He died in 1745.