The Humour of Homer and Other Essays by Samuel Butler
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page 19 of 297 (06%)
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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 8000 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 Gary, son of the Rev. Henry Francis Gary, 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 Gary 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 themselves, being, no doubt, amused by the Lamb-like pun, but also enjoying the malicious pleasure of hinting that it might have been as well for their art education if the advice of the gentle humorist had been followed. |
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