be taken as an exhaustive statement of Butler's
views upon Homeric questions. It touches but lightly on important
points, particularly regarding the origin and authorship of the
Odyssey, which are treated at much greater length in The Authoress
of the "Odyssey."

Nevertheless, "The Humour of Homer" appears to me to have a special
value as a kind of general introduction to Butler's more detailed
study of the Odyssey. His attitude towards the Homeric poems is
here expressed with extraordinary freshness and force. What that
attitude was is best explained by his own words: "If a person would
understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must
never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the
living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the
ancients as one thing and the moderns as another." Butler did not
undervalue the philological and archaeological importance of the
Iliad and the Odyssey, but it was mainly as human documents that
they appealed to him. This, I am inclined to suspect, was the root
of the objection of academic critics to him and his theories. They
did not so much resent the suggestion that the author of the Odyssey
was a woman; they could not endure that he should be treated as a
human being.

Of the remaining essays two were originally delivered as lectures;
the others appeared first in The Universal Review in 1888, 1889 and
1890. I should perhaps explain why two other essays which also
appeared in The Universal Review are not included in this
collection. The first of these, entitled "L'Affaire Holbein-
Rippel," relates to a drawing of Holbein's "Danse des Paysans" in
the Basle Museum, which is usually described as a copy, but which
Butler believed to be the work of Holbein himself. This essay
requires to be illustrated in so elaborate a manner that it was
impossible to include it in a book of this size. The second essay,
which is a sketch of the career of the sculptor Tabachetti, was
published as the first section of an article, entitled "A Sculptor
and a Shrine," of which the second part is here given under the
title "The Sanctuary of Montrigone." The section devoted to the
sculptor contains all that Butler then knew about Tabachetti, but
since it was written various documents have come to light,
principally through the investigations of Cavaliere Francesco Negri,
of Casale Monferrato, which negative some of Butler's conclusions.
Had Butle