Samuel Butler: a sketch

Samuel Butler: A Sketch, by
Henry Festing

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Festing Jones
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Title: Samuel Butler: A Sketch
Author: Henry Festing Jones

Release Date: May 1, 2007 [eBook #2993]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAMUEL
BUTLER: A SKETCH***

Transcribed from the 1921 Jonathan Cape edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

SAMUEL BUTLER: A Sketch, by Henry Festing Jones
Author of Samuel Butler: A Memoir
Jonathan Cape Eleven Gower Street London
First published in "The Humour of Homer & Other Essays" by Samuel
Butler 1913. Reissued by Jonathan Cape 1921

Samuel Butler: A Sketch
Samuel Butler was born on the 4th December, 1835, at the Rectory,
Langar, near Bingham, in Nottinghamshire. His father was the Rev.
Thomas Butler, then Rector of Langar, afterwards one of the canons of
Lincoln Cathedral, and his mother was Fanny Worsley, daughter of
John Philip Worsley of Arno's Vale, Bristol, sugar-refiner. His
grandfather was Dr. Samuel Butler, the famous headmaster of
Shrewsbury School, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield. The Butlers are
not related either to the author of Hudibras, or to the author of the
Analogy, or to the present Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Butler's father, after being at school at Shrewsbury under Dr. Butler,
went up to St. John's College, Cambridge; he took his degree in 1829,
being seventh classic and twentieth senior optime; he was ordained and
returned to Shrewsbury, where he was for some time assistant master at
the school under Dr. Butler. He married in 1832 and left Shrewsbury
for Langar. He was a learned botanist, and made a collection of dried
plants which he gave to the Town Museum of Shrewsbury.
Butler's childhood and early life were spent at Langar among the
surroundings of an English country rectory, and his education was
begun by his father. In 1843, when he was only eight years old, the first
great event in his life occurred; the family, consisting of his father and
mother, his two sisters, his brother and himself, went to Italy. The
South-Eastern Railway stopped at Ashford, 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