that it fatigued him to look at it, and said that such books ought
never to be made. Cockerell replied that such books relieved the
tedium of divine service, on which Butler made a note ending thus:

Give me rather a robin or a peripatetic cat like the one whose
loss the parishioners of St. Clement Danes are still deploring.
When I was at school at Allesley the boy who knelt opposite me at
morning prayers, with his face not more than a yard away from
mine, used to blow pretty little bubbles with his saliva which he
would send sailing off the tip of his tongue like miniature soap
bubbles; they very soon broke, but they had a career of a foot or
two. I never saw anyone else able to get saliva bubbles right
away from him and, though I have endeavoured for some fifty years
and more to acquire the art, I never yet could start the bubble
off my tongue without its bursting. Now things like this really
do relieve the tedium of church, but no missal that I have ever
seen will do anything except increase it.

In 1848 he left Allesley and went to Shrewsbury under the Rev. B. H.
Kennedy. Many of the recollections of his school life at Shrewsbury
are reproduced for the school life of Ernest Pontifex at
Roughborough in The Way of All Flesh, Dr. Skinner being Dr. Kennedy.

During these years he first heard the music of Handel; it went
straight to his heart and satisfied a longing which the music of
other composers had only awakened and intensified. He became as one
of the listening brethren who stood around "when Jubal struck the
chorded shell" in the Song for Saint Cecilia's Day:

Less than a god, they thought, there could not dwell