rly washed out as to be
almost undecipherable. Butler would have been just as well pleased if
they had remained at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, for he never liked
the book and always spoke of it as being full of youthful priggishness;
but I think he was a little hard upon it. Years afterwards, in one of
his later books, after quoting two passages from Mr. Grant Allen and
pointing out why he considered the second to be a recantation of the
first, he wrote: "When Mr. Allen does make stepping-stones of his dead
selves he jumps upon them to some tune." And he was perhaps a little
inclined to treat his own dead self too much in the same spirit.

Butler did very well with the sheep, sold out in 1864, and returned via
Callao to England. He travelled with three friends whose acquaintance he
had made in the colony; one was Charles Paine Pauli, to whom he dedicated
_Life and Habit_. He arrived in August, 1864, in London, where he took
chambers consisting of a sitting-room, a bedroom, a painting-room and a
pantry, at 15, Clifford's Inn, second floor (north). The net financial
result of the sheep-farming and the selling out was that he practically
doubled his capital, that is to say he had about 8,000 pounds. This he
left in New Zealand, invested on mortgage at 10 per cent., the then
current rate in the colony; it produced more than enough for him to live
upon in the very simple way that suited him best, and life in the Inns of
Court resembles life at Cambridge in that it reduces the cares of
housekeeping to a minimum; it suited him so well that he never changed
his rooms, remaining there thirty-eight years till his death.

He was now his own master and able at last to turn to painting. He
studied at the art school in Streatham Street, Bloomsbury, which had
formerly been managed by Henry Sass, but, in Butler's time, was being
carried on by Francis Stephen Cary, son of the Rev. Henry Francis Cary,
who had been a school-fellow of Dr. Butler at Rugby, and is well known as
the translator of Dante and the friend of Charles Lamb. Among his fellow-
students was Mr. H. R. Robertson, who told me that the young artists got
hold of the legend, which is in some of the books about Lamb, that when
Francis Stephen Cary was a boy and there was a talk at his father's house
as to what profession he should take up, Lamb, who was present, said:

"I should make him an apo-po-pothe-Cary."

They used to repeat this story freely among themse