The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 72

"Oh! it's got pins in its toes."

Butler put this into The Way of all Flesh.

{162} Philippians i. 15-18:-

Some indeed preach Christ even of envy and strife; and some also of good will:

The one preach Christ of contention, not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my bonds:

But the other of love, knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel.

What then? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.

{176} Narcissus, "Should Riches mate with Love."

{235} Butler gave this as a subject to Mr. E. P. Larken who made it into a short story ent.i.tled "The Priest's Bargain," which appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine, May, 1897.

{203} All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness.

Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?

Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time? (Eccles. vii. 15, 16, 17).

{204} Cf. "Imaginary Worlds," p. 233 post.

{225} "So, again, it is said that when Andromeda and Perseus had travelled but a little way from the rock where Andromeda had so long been chained, she began upbraiding him with the loss of her dragon who, on the whole, she said, had been very good to her. The only things we really hate are unfamiliar things." Life & Habit, Chapter viii, p. 138/9.

{251} This note is one of those that appeared in the New Quarterly Review. The Hon. Mrs. Richard Grosvenor did not see it there, but a few years later I lent her my copy. She wrote to me 31 December, 1911.

"The notes are delightful. By the way I can add to one. When Mr.

Butler came to tell me he was going to stay with Dr. Creighton, he told me that Alfred had decided he might go on finding the little flake of tobacco in the letter. Then he asked me if I would lend him a prayer-book as he thought the bishop's man ought to find one in his portmanteau when he unpacked, the visit being from a Sat.u.r.day to Monday. I fetched one and he said:

"'Is it cut?'"

{261} "Ramblings in Cheapside" in Essays on Life, Art and Science.

{263} Edmund Gurney, author of The Power of Sound, and Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research.

{279} Cf. Wamba's explanation of the Saxon swine being converted into Norman pork on their death. Ivanhoe, Chap. I.

{282} See "A Medieval Girl School" in Essays on Life, Art & Science.

{333} "Above all things, let no unwary reader do me the injustice of believing in ME. In that I write at all I am among the d.a.m.ned. If he must believe in anything, let him believe in the music of Handel, the painting of Giovanni Bellini, and in the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians" (Life and Habit, close of chapter II).

{343} "No one can hate drunkenness more than I do, but I am confident the human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given to imagination--imagination being little else than another name for illusion" (Alps and Sanctuaries, chapter III).

{364} There are letters from these people in The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler.

{369} Butler made this note in 1899 before the publication of Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered, which was published in the same year. The Odyssey Rendered info English Prose appeared in 1900 and Erewhon Revisited, the last book published in his lifetime, in 1901.

He made no a.n.a.lysis of the sales of these three books, nor of the sales of A First Year in Canterbury Settlement published in 1863, nor of his pamphlet The Evidence for the Resurrection, published in 1865.

The Way of all Flesh and Essays on Life, Art, and Science were not published till after his death. I do not know what he means by A Book of Essays, unless it may be that he incurred an outlay of 3 pounds 11s. 9d. in connection with a projected republication of his articles in the Universal Review or of some of his Italian articles about the Odyssey.

{376} Butler had two separate grounds of complaint against Charles Darwin, one scientific, the other personal. With regard to the personal quarrel some facts came to light after Butler's death and the subject is dealt with in a pamphlet ent.i.tled Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler: A Step towards Reconciliation, by Henry Festing Jones (A. C. Fifield, 1911).