Sir Hudibras, corresponding to the Don, is a Presbyterian justice of the peace, whose features are said to have been copied from those of the poet's former employer, Sir Samuel Luke.

For this, Butler has been accused of ingratitude, but the nature of their connection does not seem to have been such as to warrant the charge.
Ralph the squire, the humble Sancho of the poem, is a cross-grained dogmatic Independent.
These two the poet sends forth, as a knight-errant with a squire, to correct existing abuses of all kinds--political, religious, and scientific.

The plot is rambling and disconnected, but the author contrives to go over the whole ground of English history in his inimitable burlesque.

Unlike Cervantes, who makes his reader always sympathize with his foolish heroes, Butler brings his knight and squire into supreme contempt; he lashes the two hundred religious sects of the day, and attacks with matchless ridicule all the Puritan positions.

The poem is directly historical in its statement of events, tenets, and factions, and in its protracted religious discussions: it is indirectly historical in that it shows how this ridicule of the Puritans, only four years after the death of Cromwell, delighted the merry monarch and his vicious court, and was greatly acceptable to the large majority of the English people.