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Home  »  The World’s Wit and Humor  »  The Logic and Rhetoric of Hudibras

The World’s Wit and Humor: An Encyclopedia in 15 Volumes. 1906.

Samuel Butler (1612–1680)

The Logic and Rhetoric of Hudibras

From “Hudibras”

HE was in logic a great critic,

Profoundly skilled in analytic;

He could distinguish, and divide

A hair ’twixt south, and south-west side,

On either which he would dispute,

Confute, change hands, and still confute.

He’d undertake to prove, by force

Of argument, a man’s no horse;

He’d prove a buzzard is no fowl,

And that a lord may be an owl,

A calf an alderman, a goose a justice,

And rooks committee-men and trustees.

He’d run in debt by disputation,

And pay with ratiocination.

All this by syllogism, true

In mood and figure, he would do.

For rhetoric, he could not ope

His mouth, but out there flew a trope;

And when he happened to break off

I’ th’ middle of his speech, or cough,

H’ had hard words ready to show why,

And tell what rules he did it by;

Else, when with greatest art he spoke,

You’d think he talked like other folk.

For all a rhetorician’s rules

Teach nothing but to name his tools,

But, when he pleased to show’t, his speech

In loftiness of sound was rich:

A Babylonish dialect,

Which learned pedants much affect.

It was a party-coloured dress

Of patched and piebald languages;

’Twas English cut on Greek and Latin,

Like fustian heretofore on satin;

It had an old promiscuous tone,

As if h’ had talked three parts in one;

Which made some think, when he did gabble,

Th’ had heard three labourers of Babel,

Or Cerberus himself pronounce

A leash of languages at once.

This he as volubly would vent

As if his stock would ne’er be spent:

And truly, to support that charge,

He had supplies as vast and large;

For he could coin, or counterfeit

New words, with little or no wit;

Words so debased and hard, no stone

Was hard enough to touch them on;

And when with hasty noise he spoke ’em,

The ignorant for current took ’em—

That had the orator, who once

Did fill his mouth with pebble stones

When he harangued, but known his phrase,

He would have used no other ways.