about finding a publisher.  Chapman and Hall refused the book on the advice of George Meredith, who was then their reader, and in the end he published it at his own expense through Messrs. Trübner.

Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell told me that in 1912 Mr. Bertram Dobell, second-hand bookseller of Charing Cross Road, offered a copy of Erewhon for £1 10s.; it was thus described in his catalogue: “Unique copy with the following note in the author’s handwriting on the half-title: ‘To Miss E. M. A. Savage this first copy of Erewhon with the author’s best thanks for many invaluable suggestions and corrections.’”  When Mr. Cockerell inquired for the book it was sold.  After Miss Savage’s death in 1885 all Butler’s letters to her were returned to him, including the letter he wrote when he sent her this copy of Erewhon.  He gave her the first copy issued of all his books that were published in her lifetime, and, no doubt, wrote an inscription in each.  If the present possessors of any of them should happen to read this sketch I hope they will communicate with me, as I should like to see these books.  I should also like to see some numbers of the Drawing-Room Gazette, which about this time belonged to or was edited by a Mrs. Briggs.  Miss Savage wrote a review of Erewhon, which appeared in the number for 8th June, 1872, and Butler quoted a sentence from her review among the press notices in the second edition.  She persuaded him to write for Mrs. Briggs notices of concerts at which Handel’s music was performed.  In 1901 he made a note on one of his letters that he was thankful there were no copies of the Drawing-Room Gazette in the British Museum, meaning that he did not want people to read his musical criticisms; nevertheless, I hope some day to come across back numbers containing his articles.

The opening of Erewhon is based upon Butler’s colonial experiences; some of the descriptions remind one of passages in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, where he speaks of the excursions he made with Doctor when looking for sheep-country.  The walk over the range as far as the statues is taken from the Upper Rangitata district, with some alterations; but the walk down from the statues into Erewhon is reminiscent of the Leventina Valley in the Canton Ticino.  The great chords, which are like the music moaned by the statues are from the prelude to the first of Handel’s Trois Leçons; he used to say:

“One feels them in the diaphragm—they are, as it were, the groaning and labouring of all creation travailing together until now.”

There is a place in New Zealand named Erewhon, after the book; it is marked on the large maps, a township about fifty miles west of Napier in the Hawke Bay Province (North Island).  I am told that people in New Zealand sometimes call their houses Erewhon and occasionally spell the word Erehwon which Butler did not intend; he treated wh as a single letter, as one would treat th.  Among other traces of Erewhon now existing in real life are Butler’s Stones on the Hokitika Pass, so called because of a legend that they were in his mind when he described the statues.

The book was translated into Dutch in 1873 and into German in 1897.

Butler wrote to Charles Darwin to explain what he meant by the “Book of the Machines”: “I am sincerely sorry that some of the critics should have thought I was laughing at your theory, a thing which I never meant to do and should be shocked at having done.”  Soon after this Butler was invited to Down and paid two visits to Mr. Darwin there; he thus became acquainted with all the family and for some years was on intimate terms with Mr. (now Sir) Francis Darwin.

It is easy to see by the light of subsequent events that we should probably have had something not unlike Erewhon sooner or later, even without the Russian lady and Sir F. N. Broome, to whose promptings, owing to a certain diffidence which never left him, he was perhaps inclined to attribute too much importance.  But he would not have agreed with this view at the time; he looked upon himself as a painter and upon Erewhon as an interruption.  It had come, like one of those creatures from the Land of the Unborn, pestering him and refusing to leave him at peace until he consented to give it bodily shape.  It was only a little one, and he saw no likelihood of its having any successors.  So he satisfied its demands and then, supposing that he had written himself out, looked forward to a future in which nothing should interfere with the painting.  Nevertheless, when another of the unborn came teasing him he yielded to its importunities and allowed himself to become the author of The Fair Haven, which is his pamphlet on the Resurrection, enlarged and preceded by a realistic memoir of the pseudonymous author, John Pickard Owen.  In the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge, are two copies of the pamphlet with pages cut out; he used these pages in forming the MS. of The Fair Haven.  To have published this book as by the author of Erewhon would have been to give away the irony and satire.  And he had another reason for not disclosing his name; he remembered that as soon as curiosity about the authorship of Erewhon was satisfied, the weekly sales fell from fifty down to only two or three.  But, as he always talked openly of whatever was in his mind, he soon let out the secret of the authorship of The Fair Haven, and it became advisable to put his name to a second edition.

One result of his submitting the MS. of Erewhon to Miss Savage was that she thought he ought to write a novel, and urged him to do so.  I have no doubt that he wrote the memoir of John Pickard Owen with the idea of quieting Miss Savage and also as an experiment to ascertain whether he was likely to succeed with a novel.  The result seems to have satisfied him, for, not long after The Fair Haven, he began The Way of All Flesh, sending the MS. to Miss Savage, as he did everything he wrote, for her approval and putting her into the book as Ernest’s Aunt Alethea.  He continued writing it in the intervals of other work until her death in February, 1885, after which he did not touch it.  It was published in 1903 by Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, his literary executor.

Soon after The Fair Haven Butler began to be aware that his letter in the Press, “Darwin among the Machines,” was descending with further modifications and developing in his mind into a theory about evolution which took shape as Life and Habit; but the writing of this very remarkable and suggestive book was delayed and the painting interrupted by absence from England on business in Canada.  He had been persuaded by a college friend, a member of one of the great banking families, to call in his colonial mortgages and to put the money into several new companies.  He was going to make thirty or forty per cent, instead of only ten.  One of these companies was a Canadian undertaking, of which he became a director; it was necessary for someone to go to headquarters and investigate its affairs; he went, and was much occupied by the business for two or three years.  By the beginning of 1876 he had returned finally to London, but most of his money was lost and his financial position for the next ten years caused him very serious anxiety.  His personal expenditure was already so low that it was hardly possible to reduce it, and he set to work at his profession more industriously than ever, hoping to paint something that he could sell, his spare time being occupied with Life and Habit, which was the subject that really interested him more deeply than any other.

Following his letter in the Press, wherein he had seen machines as in process of becoming animate, he went on to regard them as living organs and limbs which we had made outside ourselves.  What would follow if we reversed this and regarded our limbs and organs as machines which we had