Butler's Hudibras has been edited many times, and much erudition has been shown in explaining the wit of that remarkable burlesque. Yet, curiously enough, the most obvious method of annotation has hitherto been entirely overlooked. This would have been to utilize the abundant material bequeathed to us by Butler himself in the form of prose “ characters,” which were published only after his death—material that throws a most interesting light upon the poet's method, and at the same time clears up many obscurities in the mock-epic. These “characters” were written between 1667 and 1669—five or six years after the appearance of the first part of Hudibras, but were not collected and published till 1759. Even then, only 121 out of 187 were printed in Thyer's edition of The Genuine Remains in Prose and Verse of Mr. Samuel Butler. The remaining 60 have lain undisturbed in the British Museum as “Addition No. 32625–6,” till the industry of a modern scholar has at last unearthed and published them. The whole collection conforms closely to the fashion of writing “characters” that was prevalent all through the seventeenth century. The character-sketch, or “ character ” as it came to be called in that age, was a short account, usually in prose, of the properties, qualities, or peculiarities, that serve to individualize a type. And such these of Butler are.