[251] This note is one of those that appeared in the New Quarterly Review. The Hon. Mrs. Richard Grosvenor did not see it there, but a few years later I lent her my copy. She wrote to me 31 December, 1911.
“The notes are delightful. By the way I can add to one. When Mr. Butler came to tell me he was going to stay with Dr. Creighton, he told me that Alfred had decided he might go on finding the little flake of tobacco in the letter. Then he asked me if I would lend him a prayer-book as he thought the bishop’s man ought to find one in his portmanteau when he unpacked, the visit being from a Saturday to Monday. I fetched one and he said:
“‘Is it cut?’”
[261] “Ramblings in Cheapside” in Essays on Life, Art and Science.
[263] Edmund Gurney, author of The Power of Sound, and Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research.
[279] Cf. Wamba’s explanation of the Saxon swine being converted into Norman pork on their death. Ivanhoe, Chap. I.
[282] See “A Medieval Girl School” in Essays on Life, Art & Science.
[333] “Above all things, let no unwary reader do me the injustice of believing in me. In that I write at all I am among the damned. If he must believe in anything, let him believe in the music of Handel, the painting of Giovanni Bellini, and in the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians” (Life and Habit, close of chapter II).
[343] “No one can hate drunkenness more than I do, but I am confident the human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given to imagination—imagination being little else than another name for illusion” (Alps and Sanctuaries, chapter III).
[364] There are letters from these people in The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler.
[369] Butler made this note in 1899 before the publication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered, which was published in the same year. The Odyssey Rendered info English Prose appeared in 1900 and Erewhon Revisited, the last book published in his lifetime, in 1901. He made no analysis of the sales of these three books, nor of the sales of A First Year in Canterbury Settlement published in 1863, nor of his pamphlet The Evidence for the Resurrection, published in 1865. The Way of all Flesh and Essays on Life, Art, and Science were not published till after his death. I do not know what he means by A Book of Essays, unless it may be that he incurred an outlay of £3 11s. 9d. in connection with a projected republication of his articles in the Universal Review or of some of his Italian articles about the Odyssey.