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 the book of whose assistance he had now been deprived in a
passage which echoes the opening of Chapter V of 'Ex Voto', where he
points out the resemblances between Varallo and Jerusalem.

Early in 1888 the leading members of the Shrewsbury Archaeological
Society asked Butler to write a memoir of his grandfather and of his
father for their Quarterly Journal. This he undertook to do when he
should have finished 'Ex Voto'. In December, 1888, his sisters, with
the idea of helping him to write the memoir, gave him his
grandfather's correspondence, which extended from 1790 to 1839. On
looking over these very voluminous papers he became penetrated with