As the author of Hudibras (1663-1678), a poetic monster of grotesque comic/satiric proportions, Samuel Butler has achieved legendary status as a monster maker. Previous to this century, Butler was mainly known as an anti-Puritan satirist who broadly followed the model of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605) in creating the perfect hypocrite, Sir Hudibras the Presbyterian Knight. Hudibras, a poem in double and triple rhyming iambic-pentameter couplets, longer than John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), is not simply identifiable as burlesque, mock epic, parody, or allegory. It is, like the Butler of legend, an unclassifiable eccentricity, a true original in English literature.

Recent criticism of Samuel Butler has attempted to replace the Butler of legend with a Butler whose literary creations are more humanly recognizable, more understandable in terms of the contexts in which he worked. The problem of providing detail in the portrait of Samuel Butler has been hampered...