It was natural to suppose, that after the Restoration, and the publication of his Hudibras, our poet should have appeared in public life, and have been rewarded for the eminent service which his poem, by giving new popularity to the Cavalier party, and covering their enemies with derision and contempt, did to the royal cause. "Every eye," says Dr Johnson, "watched for the golden shower which was to fall upon its author, who certainly was not without his part in the general expectation." But his innate modesty, and studious turn of mind, prevented solicitations: never having tasted the idle luxuries of life, he did not make for himself needless wants, or pine after imaginary pleasures: his fortune, indeed, was small, and so was his ambition; his integrity of life, and modest temper, rendered him contented. There is good authority for believing, however, that at one time he was gratified with an order on the treasury for 300l. which is said to have passed all the offices without payment of fees, and this gave him an opportunity of displaying his disinterested integrity, by conveying the entire sum immediately to a friend, in trust for the use of his creditors. Dr Zachary Pearce, on the authority of Mr Lowndes of the treasury, asserts, that Mr Butler received from Charles the Second an annual pension of 100l.; add to this, he was appointed secretary to the Earl of Carberry, then lord president of the principality of Wales, and soon after steward of Ludlow castle,[1] an office which he seems to have held in 1661 and 1662, but possibly earlier and later. With all this, the Court was thought to have been guilty of a glaring neglect in his case, and the public were scandalized at its ingratitude. The indigent poets, who have always claimed a prescriptive right to live on the munificence of their contemporaries, were the loudest in their remonstrances. Dryden, Oldham, and Otway, while in appearance they complained of the unrewarded merits of our author, obliquely lamented their private and particular grievances. Nash says that Mr Butler's own sense of the disappointment, and the impression it made on his spirits, are sufficiently marked by the circumstance of his having twice transcribed the following distich with some variation in his MS. common-place book:
