of meetings with Sir George Trevelyan and Lord Morley earlier
in the book. It is all pretty stupid; but when a man is ridden by a
vanity like that there can be no healthy pleasure to be got out of
writing for its own sake. You must have your public flat on its back
before your vanity will be soothed.

Another failing of Butler's, shared, I am sorry to say, by Mr. Jones,
was a love of little jokes and an inability to see when and where they
could be worked off, or perhaps I ought to say when they were worked
out. A great many of them were pinpricks rather than jokes; he only
made them "to annoy." Well, they did, and they do, annoy--not because
they were jokes, but because they were feeble jokes. "If it is thought
desirable to have an article on the _Odyssey_, I have abundant, most
aggravating and impudent matter about Penelope and King Menelaus"--so
he wrote to Mr. H. Quilter, who naturally jumped at it. Here is
another gem which Mr. Jones seems to admire: "There will be no
comfortable and safe development of our social arrangements--I mean
we shall not get infanticide, and the permission of suicide, nor cheap
and easy divorce--till Jesus Christ's ghost has been laid."

All that can be said for that is that it is vivacious, and that it has
helped Mr. Shaw, who has certainly bettered the instruction. There
are others which are a good deal more annoying than that. Jokes about
infanticide and Jesus Christ defeat themselves, and always will. They
are on a level with jokes about death or one's mother; they recoil
and smite the smiter on the nose. I confess that I find the joke
about Charles Lamb irritating. Butler said that he could not read
Lamb because Canon Ainger went to tea with his (Butler's) sisters. His
gibes at Dante are as bad--in fact they are worse, aggravated by the
fact that, having never read (he assures us) a word of him, he puts
him down as one of the seven humbugs of Christendom. He would not read
Dante because he had liked Virgil, nor Virgil because Tennyson liked
him. "We are not amused," as Queen Victoria said of another little
joke.

The correspondence with Miss Savage, again, does not reveal a pleasant
personality. Indeed, the discomfort one gets from it is at times
painful. Mr. Jones says that she bored Butler, and I don't wonder at
it. The wonder would rather be that she did not set his teeth on
edge if it were not that he was nearly as bad as she was. It is not
a matter of facetiousness--I dare sa