Restoration: Samuel Butler

"Samuel Butler (1612–1680) ... is remembered now primarily for a long satirical burlesque poem on Puritanism entitled Hudibras" (wikipedia). It is probably enough to know who Butler is and that he invented a verse form now referred to as Hudibrastic. The closest American equivalent to this author is Thomas Morton who wrote the the prose satire New English Canaan which attacked the Puritans of Plimoth Colony.

• Biography
• Influences on Butler: Rabelais and Cervantes' Don Quixote (wikipedia).
• The title comes from the name of a knight in Edmund Spencer's Faerie Queene who is described as "not so good of deeds as great of name" and "more huge in strength then wise in work" (wikipedia).
• Form: iambic tetrameter in rhyming couplets, with surprising feminine rhymes = Hudibrastic (wikipedia)
• Works (etexts)
  • Hudibras
    • Overview, Structure, Plot
    • etext

• WELL! SIDROPHEL, though 'tis in vain
  To tamper with your crazy brain,
  Without trepanning of your skull
  As often as the moon's at full
  'Tis not amiss, e're y' are giv'n o'er, 5
  To try one desp'rate med'cine more
  For where your case can be no worse,
  The desp'rat'st is the wisest course.
  Is't possible that you, whose ears
  Are of the tribe of Issachar's, 10
  And might (with equal reason) either,
  For merit, or extent of leather,
  With WILLIAM PRYN'S, before they were
  Retrench'd and crucify'd, compare,
  Shou'd yet be deaf against a noise 15
  So roaring as the publick voice
  That speaks your virtues free, and loud,
  And openly, in ev'ry crowd,
  As, loud as one that sings his part
  T' a wheel-barrow or turnip-cart, 20
  Or your new nick-nam'd old invention
  To cry green-hastings with an engine; (from Hudibras)