rears its stately proportions on the left; opposite is the bridge;
over that, on the right, the thick dark foliage is blackening almost
into sombreness as the night draws on. Immediately beneath are the
arched cloisters resounding with the solitary footfall of meditative
students, and suggesting grateful retirement. I say to myself then,
as I sit in my open window, that for a continuance I would rather
have this than any scene I have visited during the whole of our most
enjoyed tour, and fetch down a Thucydides, for I must go to Shilleto
at nine o'clock to-morrow.




TRANSLATION FROM AN UNPUBLISHED WORK OF HERODOTUS



This piece and the ten that follow it date from Butler's
undergraduate days. They were preserved by the late Canon Joseph
McCormick, who was Butler's contemporary at Cambridge and knew him
well.

In a letter to THE TIMES, published 27 June, 1902, shortly after
Butler's death, Canon McCormick gave some interesting details of
Butler's Cambridge days. "I have in my possession," he wrote, "some
of the skits with which he amused himself and some of his personal
friends. Perhaps the skit professed to be a translation from
Thucydides, inimitable in its way, applied to Johnians in their
successes or defeats on the river, or it was the 'Prospectus of the
Great Split Society,' attacking those who wished to form narrow or