"The seventeenth-century satirist Samuel Butler is known chiefly as the author of Hudibras, the mock-heroic poem much admired by Dryden, Swift, and Samuel Johnson. He was also the author of a very large number of prose Characters and a variety of other poems, including The elephant in the Moon, a satire on the Royal Society; and he kept a private commonplace book in which he recorded his views on religion, politics, philosophy, and literature. ... The selection is designed to make Butler's works accessible to the modern reader and to show how he expressed a distinctive personality and outlook in a variety of literary forms."--Back cover.