the Sacro Monte at once. It must be the next thing I do."

Accordingly, on returning home, he took up photography and,
immediately after Christmas, went back to Varallo to photograph the
statues and collect material. Much research was necessary and many
visits to out-of-the-way sanctuaries which might have contained work
by the sculptor Tabachetti, whom he was rescuing from oblivion and
identifying with the Flemish Jean de Wespin. One of these visits,
made after his book was published, forms the subject of "The
Sanctuary of Montrigone." 'Ex Voto', the book about Varallo,
appeared in 1888, and an Italian translation by Cavaliere Angelo
Rizzetti was published at Novara in 1894.

"Quis Desiderio . . . ?" ('The Humour of Homer and Other Essays')
was developed in 1888 from something in a letter from Miss Savage
nearly ten years earlier. On the 15th of December, 1878, in
acknowledging this letter, Butler wrote:


I am sure that any tree or flower nursed by Miss Cobbe would be the
VERY first to fade away and that her gazelles would die long before
they ever came to know her WELL. The sight of the brass buttons on
her pea-jacket would settle them out of hand.


There was an enclosure in Miss Savage's letter, but it is
unfortunately lost; I suppose it must have been a newspaper cutting
with an allusion to Moore's poem and perhaps a portrait of Miss
Frances Power Cobbe--pea-jacket, brass buttons, and all.