alking, and on Sundays,
whatever the weather, he nearly always went into the country
walking; his map of the district for thirty miles round London is
covered all over with red lines showing where he had been. He
sometimes went out of town from Saturday to Monday, and for over
twenty years spent Christmas at Boulogne-sur-Mer.

There is a Sacro Monte at Varallo-Sesia with many chapels, each
containing life-sized statues and frescoes illustrating the life of
Christ. Butler had visited this sanctuary repeatedly, and was a
great favourite with the townspeople, who knew that he was studying
the statues and frescoes in the chapels, and who remembered that in
the preface to Alps and Sanctuaries he had declared his intention of
writing about them. In August, 1887, the Varallesi brought matters
to a head by giving him a civic dinner on the Mountain. Everyone
was present, there were several speeches and, when we were coming
down the slippery mountain path after it was all over, he said to
me:

"You know, there's nothing for it now but to write that book about
the Sacro Monte at once. It must be the next thing I do."

Accordingly, on returning home, he took up photography and,
immediately after Christmas, went back to Varallo to photograph the
statues and collect material. Much research was necessary and many
visits to out-of-the-way sanctuaries which might have contained work
by the sculptor Tabachetti, whom he was rescuing from oblivion and
identifying with the Flemish Jean de Wespin. One of these visits,
made after his book was published, forms the subject of "The
Sanctuary of Montrigone," reproduced in this volume. Ex Voto, the
book about Varallo, appeared in 1888, and an Italian translation by
Cavaliere Angelo Rizzetti was published at Novara in 1894.

"Quis Desiderio . . .?" the second essay in this volume, was
developed in 1888 from something in a letter from Miss Savage nearly
ten years earlier. On the 15th of December, 1878, in acknowledging
this letter, Butler wrote:

I am sure that any tree or flower nursed by Miss Cobbe would be
the _very_ first to fade away and that her gazelles would die
long before they ever came to know her _well_. The sight of the
brass buttons on her pea-jacket would settle them out of hand.

There was an enclosure in Miss Savage's letter, but it is
unfortunately lost; I suppose it must have been a newspaper cutting
with an allusion to Moore's poem and perhaps a portrait of Miss