however, want to put Dr. Butler aside, so I undertook to investigate.  It is stated on the title-page of both Narcissus and Ulysses that the words were written and the music composed by both of us.  As to the music, each piece bears the initials of the one who actually composed it.  As to the words, it was necessary first to settle some general scheme and this, in the case of Narcissus, grew in the course of conversation.  The scheme of Ulysses was constructed in a more formal way and Butler had perhaps rather less to do with it.  We were bound by the Odyssey, which is, of course, too long to be treated fully, and I selected incidents that attracted me and settled the order of the songs and choruses.  For this purpose, as I out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in the smallness of my Greek, I used The Adventures of Ulysses by Charles Lamb, which we should have known nothing about but for Ainger’s book.  Butler acquiesced in my proposals, but, when it came to the words themselves, he wrote practically all the libretto, as he had done in the case of Narcissus; I did no more than suggest a few phrases and a few lines here and there.

We had sent Narcissus for review to the papers, and, as a consequence, about this time, made the acquaintance of Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland, then musical critic of the Times; he introduced us to that learned musician William Smith Rockstro, under whom we studied medieval counterpoint while composing Ulysses.  We had already made some progress with it when it occurred to Butler that it would not take long and might, perhaps, be safer if he were to look at the original poem, just to make sure that Lamb had not misled me.  Not having forgotten all his Greek, he bought a copy of the Odyssey and was so fascinated by it that he could not put it down.  When he came to the Phoeacian episode of Ulysses at Scheria he felt he must be reading the description of a real place and that something in the personality of the author was eluding him.  For months he was puzzled, and, to help in clearing up the mystery, set about translating the poem.  In August, 1891, he had preceded me to Chiavenna, and on a letter I wrote him, telling him when to expect me, he made this note:

It was during the few days that I was at Chiavenna (at the Hotel Grotta Crimée) that I hit upon the feminine authorship of the Odyssey.  I did not find out its having been written at Trapani till January, 1892.

He suspected that the authoress in describing both Scheria and Ithaca was drawing from her native country and searched on the Admiralty charts for the features enumerated in the poem; this led him to the conclusion that the country could only be Trapani, Mount Eryx, and the Ægadean Islands.  As soon as he could after this discovery he went to Sicily to study the locality and found it in all respects suitable for his theory; indeed, it was astonishing how things kept turning up to support his view.  It is all in his book The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1897 and dedicated to his friend Cavaliere Biagio Ingroja of Calatafimi.

His first visit to Sicily was in 1892, in August—a hot time of the year, but it was his custom to go abroad in the autumn.  He returned to Sicily every year (except one), but latterly went in the spring.  He made many friends all over the island, and after his death the people of Calatafimi called a street by his name, the Via Samuel Butler, “thus,” as Ingroja wrote when he announced the event to me, “honouring a great man’s memory, handing down his name to posterity, and doing homage to the friendly English nation.”  Besides showing that the Odyssey was written by a woman in Sicily and translating the poem into English prose, he also translated the Iliad, and, in March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad to see the country therein described, where he found nothing to cause him to disagree with the received theories.

It has been said of him in a general way that the fact of an opinion being commonly held was enough to make him profess the opposite.  It was enough to make him examine the opinion for himself, when it affected any of the many subjects which interested him, and if, after giving it his best attention, he found it did not hold water, then no weight of authority could make him say that it did.  This matter of the geography of the Iliad is only one among many commonly received opinions which he examined for himself and found no reason to dispute; on these he considered it unnecessary to write.

It is characteristic of his passion for doing things thoroughly that he learnt nearly the whole of the Odyssey and the Iliad by heart.  He had a Pickering copy of each poem, which he carried in his pocket and referred to in railway trains, both in England and Italy, when saying the poems over to himself.  These two little books are now in the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge.  He was, however, disappointed to find that he could not retain more than a book or two at a time and that, on learning more, he forgot what he had learnt first; but he was about sixty at the time.  Shakespeare’s Sonnets, on which he published a book in 1899, gave him less trouble in this respect; he knew them all by heart, and also their order, and one consequence of this was that he wrote some sonnets in the Shakespearian form.  He found this intimate knowledge of the poet’s work more useful for his purpose than reading commentaries by those who are less familiar with it.  “A commentary on a poem,” he would say, “may be useful as material on which to form an estimate of the commentator, but the poem itself is the most important document you can consult, and it is impossible to know it too intimately if you want to form an opinion about it and its author.”

It was always the author, the work of God, that interested him more than the book—the work of man; the painter more than the picture; the composer more than the music.  “If a writer, a painter, or a musician makes me feel that he held those things to be lovable which I myself hold to be lovable I am satisfied; art is only interesting in so far as it reveals the personality of the artist.”  Handel was, of course, “the greatest of all musicians.”  Among the painters he chiefly loved Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Rembrandt, Holbein, Velasquez, and De Hooghe; in poetry Shakespeare, Homer, and the Authoress of the Odyssey; and in architecture the man, whoever he was, who designed the Temple of Neptune at Paestum.  Life being short, he did not see why he should waste any of it in the company of inferior people when he had these.  And he treated those he met in daily life in the same spirit: it was what he found them to be that attracted or repelled him; what others thought about them was of little or no consequence.

And now, at the end of his life, his thoughts reverted to the two subjects which had occupied him more than thirty years previously—namely, Erewhon and the evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The idea of what might follow from belief in one single supposed miracle had been slumbering during all those years and at last rose again in the form of a sequel to Erewhon.  In Erewhon Revisited Mr. Higgs returns to find that the Erewhonians now believe in him as a god in consequence of the supposed miracle of his going up in a balloon to induce his heavenly father to send the rain.  Mr. Higgs and the reader know that there was no miracle in the case, but Butler wanted to show that whether it was a miracle or not did not signify provided that the people believed it be one.  And so Mr. Higgs is present in the temple which is being dedicated to him and his worship.

The existence of his son George was an afterthought and gave occasion for the second leading idea of the book—the story of a father trying to win the love of a hitherto unknown son