missal, laboriously illuminated. He found 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