Poet and satirist, famous as the author of Hudibras, the most memorable burlesque poem in the English language and the first English satire to make a notable and successful attack on ideas rather than on personalities. It is directed against the fanaticism, pretentiousness, pedantry, and hypocrisy that Butler saw in militant Puritanism, extremes which he attacked wherever he saw them.

    Butler, the son of a farmer, was educated at the King's school, Worcester. He afterward obtained employment in the household of the Countess of Kent, at Wrest, Bedfordshire, where he had access to a fine library. He then passed into the service of Sir Samuel Luke, a rigid Presbyterian, a colonel in the Parliamentary army, and scoutmaster general for Bedfordshire. In his service Butler undoubtedly had firsthand opportunity to study the motley collection of cranks, fanatics, and scoundrels who attached themselves to the Puritan army and whose antics were to form the subject of his famous poem. At the restoration of the monarchy he obtained a post as secretary to Richard Vaughan, Earl of Carbery, lord president of Wales, who made him steward of Ludlow castle, an office he held throughout 1661. About this time he is said to have married a woman with a "competent fortune" that was, however, squandered through "being put out on ill securities."

    After the appearance of Hudibras King Charles and the lord chancellor, Clarendon, promised Butler considerable emoluments that never seem to have materialized. In the latter part of his life he was attached to the suite of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham; but there seems little doubt that Butler died a poor and disappointed man who, at the end of an apparently successful literary career, in the words of a contemporary, "found nothing left but poverty and praise."
 
 

© copyright.http://www.britannica.com