Ralph the squire, the humble Sancho of the poem, is a cross-grained
dogmatic Independent.
These two the poet sends forth, as a knight-errant with a squire, to
correct existing abuses of all kinds--political, religious, and
scientific. The plot is rambling and disconnected, but the author
contrives to go over the whole ground of English history in his inimitable
burlesque. Unlike Cervantes, who makes his reader always sympathize with
his foolish heroes, Butler brings his knight and squire into supreme
contempt; he lashes the two hundred religious sects of the day, and
attacks with matchless ridicule all the Puritan positions. The poem is
directly historical in its statement of events, tenets, and factions, and
in its protracted religious discussions: it is indirectly historical in
that it shows how this ridicule of the Puritans, only four years after the
death of Cromwell, delighted the merry monarch and his vicious court, and
was greatly acceptable to the large majority of the English people. This
fact marks the suddenness of the historic change from the influence of
Puritanism to that of the restored Stuarts.
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