baptized 1613 – 1680 · English poet and satirist, author of Hudibras
Samuel Butler (baptized 14 February 1613, died 25 September 1680) was an English poet and satirist, the son of a Worcestershire farmer, and is remembered almost entirely for one book. Hudibras — a mock-heroic poem of more than 11,000 lines about a preposterous Cromwellian knight and his squire, loosely modelled on Don Quixote — delighted Restoration royalists and stayed more or less continuously in print from the 1660s until the First World War. Its jangling octosyllabic couplets were imitated so widely that the verse form is still called Hudibrastic, and the poem seeded English with phrases most speakers now assume came from somewhere older and holier.