without inconvenience. The bread was sour and the Italian
butter rank and cheesy--often uneatable. Beggars ran after the
carriage all day long and when they got nothing jeered at the
travellers and called them heretics. They spent half the winter in
Rome, and the children were taken up to the top of St. Peter's as a
treat to celebrate their father's birthday. In the Sistine Chapel
they saw the cardinals kiss the toe of Pope Gregory XVI, and in the
Corso, in broad daylight, they saw a monk come rolling down a
staircase like a sack of potatoes, bundled into the street by a man
and his wife. The second half of the winter was spent in Naples.
This early introduction to the land which he always thought of and
often referred to as his second country made an ineffaceable
impression upon him.

In January, 1846, he went to school at Allesley, near Coventry,
under the Rev. E. Gibson. He seldom referred to his life there,
though sometimes he would say something that showed he had not
forgotten all about it. For instance, in 1900 Mr. Sydney C.
Cockerell, now the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge,
showed him a medieval 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.