The Humour of Homer and Other Essays by Samuel Butler
page 40 of 297 (13%)
page 40 of 297 (13%)
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months to reading the Excursion, his letters, &c., with a view to
following up the clue, and I am disappointed though, to say the truth, the idea of a _crime_ had not flashed upon me when I wrote to you. How well the works of _great_ men repay attention and study! But you, who know your Bible so well, how was it that you did not detect the plagiarism in the last verse? Just refer to the account of the disappearance of Aaron (I have not a Bible at hand, we want one sadly in the club) but I am sure that the words are identical [I cannot see what Miss Savage meant. 1901. S. B.] Cassell's Magazine have offered a prize for setting the poem to music, and I fell to thinking how it could be treated musically, and so came to a right comprehension of it. Although Butler, when editing Miss Savage's letters in 1901, could not see the resemblance between Wordsworth's poem and Numbers XX., he at once saw a strong likeness between Lucy and Moore's heroine whom he had been keeping in an accessible pigeon-hole of his memory ever since his letter about Miss Frances Power Cobbe. He now sent Lucy to keep her company and often spoke of the pair of them as probably the two most disagreeable young women in English literature--an opinion which he must have expressed to Miss Savage and with which I have no doubt she agreed. In the spring of 1888, on his return from photographing the statues at Varallo, he found, to his disgust, that the authorities of the British Museum had removed Frost's Lives of Eminent Christians from its accustomed shelf in the Reading Room. Soon afterwards Harry Quilter asked him to write for the Universal Review and he responded with "Quis Desiderio . . .?" In this essay he compares himself to Wordsworth and dwells on the points of resemblance between Lucy and |
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