arrying out this intention, and he sailed to New
Zealand in the autumn of 1859. He owned a sheep run in the Upper Rangitata
district of the province of Canterbury, and in less than five years was
able to return home with a moderate competence, most of which was
afterwards lost in unlucky investments. The Rangitata district supplied the
setting for his romance of _Erewhon, or Over the Range_ (1872), satirizing
the Darwinian theory and conventional religion. _Erewhon_ had a sequel
thirty years later (1901) in _Erewhon Revisited_, in which the narrator of
the earlier romance, who had escaped from Erewhon in a balloon, finds
himself, on revisiting the country after a considerable interval, the
object of a topsy-turvy cult, to which he gave the name of "Sunchildism."
In 1873 he had published a book of similar tendency, _The Fair Haven_,
which purported to be a "work in defence of the miraculous element in our
Lord's ministry upon earth" by a fictitious J.P. Owen, of whom he wrote a
memoir. Butler was a man of great versatility, who pursued his
investigations in classical scholarship, in Shakespearian criticism,
biology and art with equal independence and originality. On his return from
New Zealand he had established himself at Clifford's Inn, and studied
painting, exhibiting regularly in the Academy between 1868 and 1876. But
with the publication of _Life and Habit_ (1877) he began to recognize
literature as his life work. The book was followed by three others,
attacking Darwinism--_Evolution Old and New, or the Theories of Buffon, Dr
Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck as compared with that of Mr C. Darwin_ (1879);
_Unconscious Memory_ (1880), a comparison between the theory of Dr E.
Hering and the _Philosophy of the Unconscious_ of Dr E. von Hartmann; and
_Luck or Cunning_ (1886). He had a thorough knowledge of northern Italy and
its art. In _Ex Voto_ (1888) he introduced many English readers to the art
of Tabachetti and Gaudenzio Ferrari at Varallo. He learnt nearly the whole
of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ by heart, and translated both poems (1898
and 1900) into colloquial English prose. In his _Authoress of the Odyssey_
(1897) he propounded two theories: that the poem was the work of a woman,
who drew her own portrait in Nausicaa; and that it was written at Trapani,
in Sicily, a proposition which he supported by elaborate investigations on
the spot. In another book on the _Shakespeare Sonnets_ (1899) he aimed at
destroying the exp