on and
study! But you, who know your Bible so well, how was it that you
did not detect the plagiarism in the last verse? Just refer to
the account of the disappearance of Aaron (I have not a Bible at
hand, we want one sadly in the club) but I am sure that the words
are identical [I cannot see what Miss Savage meant. 1901. S.
B.] Cassell's Magazine have offered a prize for setting the poem
to music, and I fell to thinking how it could be treated
musically, and so came to a right comprehension of it.

Although Butler, when editing Miss Savage's letters in 1901, could
not see the resemblance between Wordsworth's poem and Numbers XX.,
he at once saw a strong likeness between Lucy and Moore's heroine
whom he had been keeping in an accessible pigeon-hole of his memory
ever since his letter about Miss Frances Power Cobbe. He now sent
Lucy to keep her company and often spoke of the pair of them as
probably the two most disagreeable young women in English
literature--an opinion which he must have expressed to Miss Savage
and with which I have no doubt she agreed.

In the spring of 1888, on his return from photographing the statues
at Varallo, he found, to his disgust, that the authorities of the
British Museum had removed Frost's Lives of Eminent Christians from
its accustomed shelf in the Reading Room. Soon afterwards Harry
Quilter asked him to write for the Universal Review and he responded
with "Quis Desiderio . . .?" In this essay he compares himself to
Wordsworth and dwells on the points of resemblance between Lucy and
the book of whose assistance he had now been deprived in a passage
which echoes the opening of Chapter V of Ex Voto, where he points
out the resemblances between Varallo and Jerusalem.

Early in 1888 the leading members of the Shrewsbury Archaeological
Society asked Butler to write a memoir of his grandfather and of his
father for their Quarterly Journal. This he undertook to do when he
should have finished Ex Voto. In December, 1888, his sisters, with
the idea of helping him to write the memoir, gave him his
grandfather's correspondence, which extended from 1790 to 1839. On
looking over these very voluminous papers he became penetrated with
an almost Chinese reverence for his ancestor and, after getting the
Archaeological Society to absolve him from his promise to write the
memoir, set about a full life of Dr. Butler, which was not published
till 1896. The delay was caused partly by the immen