, whence they travelled to Dover
in their own carriage; the carnage was put on board the steamboat, they
crossed the Channel, and proceeded to Cologne, up the Rhine to Basle and
on through Switzerland into Italy, through Parma, where Napoleon's widow
was still reigning, Modena, Bologna, Florence, and so to Rome. They had
to drive where there was no railway, and there was then none in all Italy
except between Naples and Castellamare. They seemed to pass a fresh
custom-house every day, but, by tipping the searchers, generally got
through 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 b