, one at St. John's College, Cambridge, and
one at the Schools, Shrewsbury.

This is Butler's own account of himself, taken from a letter to Sir
Julius von Haast; although written in 1865 it is true of his mode of life
for many years:

I have been taking lessons in painting ever since I arrived. I was
always very fond of it and mean to stick to it; it suits me and I am
not without hopes that I shall do well at it. I live almost the life
of a recluse, seeing very few people and going nowhere that I can
help--I mean in the way of parties and so forth; if my friends had
their way they would fritter away my time without any remorse; but I
made a regular stand against it from the beginning and so, having my
time pretty much in my own hands, work hard; I find, as I am sure you
must find, that it is next to impossible to combine what is commonly
called society and work.

But the time saved from society was not all devoted to painting. He
modified his letter to the _Press_ about "Darwin among the Machines" and,
so modified, it appeared in 1865 as "The Mechanical Creation" in the
_Reasoner_, a paper then published in London by Mr. G. J. Holyoake. And
his mind returned to the considerations which had determined him to
decline to be ordained. In 1865 he printed anonymously a pamphlet which
he had begun in New Zealand, the result of his study of the Greek
Testament, entitled _The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as
given by the Four Evangelists critically examined_. After weighing this
evidence and comparing one account with another, he came to the
conclusion that Jesus Christ did not die upon the cross. It is
improbable that a man officially executed should escape death, but the
alternative, that a man actually dead should return to life, seemed to
Butler more improbable still and unsupported by such evidence as he found
in the gospels. From this evidence he concluded that Christ swooned and
recovered consciousness after his body had passed into the keeping of
Joseph of Arimathaea. He did not suppose fraud on the part of the first
preachers of Christianity; they sincerely believed that Christ died and
rose again. Joseph and Nicodemus probably knew the truth but kept
silence. The idea of what might follow from belief in one single
supposed miracle was never hereafter absent from Butler's mind.

In 1869, having been working too hard, he went abroad for a long change.
On his w