a charm, but it is a charm that would not, I fear, survive in print
and, personally, I find that it makes the books distracting for
continuous reading. Moreover they were not intended to be published
as they stand ("Preface to Vol. II," p. 215 post), they were
intended for his own private use as a quarry from which to take
material for his writing, and it is remarkable that in practice he
scarcely ever used them in this way ("These Notes," p. 261 post).
When he had written and re-written a note and spoken it and repeated
it in conversation, it became so much a part of him that, if he
wanted to introduce it in a book, it was less trouble to re-state it
again from memory than to search through his "precious indexes" for
it and copy it ("Gadshill and Trapani," p. 194, "At Piora," p. 272
post). But he could not have re-stated a note from memory if he had
not learnt it by writing it, so that it may be said that he did use
the notes for his books, though not precisely in the way he
originally intended. And the constant re-writing and re-considering
were useful also by forcing him to settle exactly what he thought and
to state it as clearly and tersely as possible. In this way the
making of the notes must have had an influence on the formation of
his style--though here again he had no such idea in his mind when
writing them ("Style," pp. 186-7 post)

In one of the notes he says:

"A man may make, as it were, cash entries of himself in a day-book,
but the entries in the ledger and the balancing of the accounts
should be done by others."

When I began to write the Memoir of Butler on which I am still
engaged, I marked all the more autobiographical notes and had them