ar (except one), but latterly went in the spring. He made many
friends all over the island, and after his death the people of Calatafimi
called a street by his name, the Via Samuel Butler, "thus," as Ingroja
wrote when he announced the event to me, "honouring a great man's memory,
handing down his name to posterity, and doing homage to the friendly
English nation." Besides showing that the _Odyssey_ was written by a
woman in Sicily and translating the poem into English prose, he also
translated the _Iliad_, and, in March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad
to see the country therein described, where he found nothing to cause him
to disagree with the received theories.

It has been said of him in a general way that the fact of an opinion
being commonly held was enough to make him profess the opposite. It was
enough to make him examine the opinion for himself, when it affected any
of the many subjects which interested him, and if, after giving it his
best attention, he found it did not hold water, then no weight of
authority could make him say that it did. This matter of the geography
of the _Iliad_ is only one among many commonly received opinions which he
examined for himself and found no reason to dispute; on these he
considered it unnecessary to write.

It is characteristic of his passion for doing things thoroughly that he
learnt nearly the whole of the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_ by heart. He
had a Pickering copy of each poem, which he carried in his pocket and
referred to in railway trains, both in England and Italy, when saying the
poems over to himself. These two little books are now in the library of
St. John's College, Cambridge. He was, however, disappointed to find
that he could not retain more than a book or two at a time and that, on
learning more, he forgot what he had learnt first; but he was about sixty
at the time. Shakespeare's Sonnets, on which he published a book in
1899, gave him less trouble in this respect; he knew them all by heart,
and also their order, and one consequence of this was that he wrote some
sonnets in the Shakespearian form. He found this intimate knowledge of
the poet's work more useful for his purpose than reading commentaries by
those who are less familiar with it. "A commentary on a poem," he would
say, "may be useful as material on which to form an estimate of the
commentator, but the poem itself is the most important document you can
consult, and it is impossible to kn