te of the publication of the third part, we hear nothing certain of
Butler. On the publication of _Hudibras_ he was sent for by Lord Chancellor
Hyde (Clarendon), says Aubrey, and received many promises, none of which
was fulfilled. He is said to have received a gift of L300 from Charles II.,
and to have been secretary to George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, when
the latter was chancellor of the university of Cambridge. Most of his
biographers, in their eagerness to prove the ill-treatment which Butler is
supposed to have received, disbelieve both these stories, perhaps without
sufficient reason. Butler's satire on Buckingham in his _Characters_
(_Remains_, 1759) shows such an intimate knowledge that it is probable the
second story is true. Two years after the publication of the third part of
_Hudibras_ he died, on the 25th of September 1680, and was buried by his
friend Longueville, a bencher of the Middle Temple, in the churchyard of St
Paul's, Covent Garden. He was, we are told, "of a leonine-coloured hair,
sanguine, choleric, middle-sized, strong." A portrait by Lely at Oxford and
others elsewhere represent him as somewhat hard-featured.

Of the neglect of Butler by the court something must be said. It must be
remembered that the complaints on the subject supposed to have been uttered
by the poet all occur in the spurious posthumous works, that men of letters
have been at all times but too prone to complain of lack of patronage, that
Butler's actual service was rendered when the day was already won, and that
the pathetic stories of the poet starving and dying in want are
contradicted by the best authority--Charles Longueville, son of the poet's
friend--who asserted that Butler, though often disappointed, was never
reduced to anything like want or beggary and did not die in any person's
debt. But the most significant notes on the subject are Aubrey's,[1] that
"he might have had preferments at first, but would not accept any but very
good, so at last he had none at all, and died in want"; and the memorandum
of the same author, that "satirical wits disoblige whom they converse with,
&c., consequently make to themselves many enemies and few friends, and this
was his manner and case."

Three monuments have been erected to the poet's memory--the first in
Westminster Abbey in 1721, by John Barber, mayor of London, who is
spitefully referred to by Pope for daring to connect his name with
Butler's. In 1786 a tablet was pla