I have no heart for continuing this article, and if I had, I have nothing of interest to say.  No one’s literary career can have been smoother or more unchequered than mine.  I have published all my books at my own expense, and paid for them in due course.  What can be conceivably more unromantic?  For some years I had a little literary grievance against the authorities of the British Museum because they would insist on saying in their catalogue that I had published three sermons on Infidelity in the year 1820.  I thought I had not, and got them out to see.  They were rather funny, but they were not mine.  Now, however, this grievance has been removed.  I had another little quarrel with them because they would describe me as “of St. John’s College, Cambridge,” an establishment for which I have the most profound veneration, but with which I have not had the honour to be connected for some quarter of a century.  At last they said they would change this description if I would only tell them what I was, for, though they had done their best to find out, they had themselves failed.  I replied with modest pride that I was a Bachelor of Arts.  I keep all my other letters inside my name, not outside.  They mused and said it was unfortunate that I was not a Master of Arts.  Could I not get myself made a Master?  I said I understood that a Mastership was an article the University could not do under about five pounds, and that I was not disposed to go sixpence higher than three ten.  They again said it was a pity, for it would be very inconvenient to them if I did not keep to something between a bishop and a poet.  I might be anything I liked in reason, provided I showed proper respect for the alphabet; but they had got me between “Samuel Butler, bishop,” and “Samuel Butler, poet.”  It would be very troublesome to shift me, and bachelor came before bishop.  This was reasonable, so I replied that, under those circumstances, if they pleased, I thought I would like to be a philosophical writer.  They embraced the solution, and, no matter what I write now, I must remain a philosophical writer as long as I live, for the alphabet will hardly be altered in my time, and I must be something between “Bis” and “Poe.”  If I could get a volume of my excellent namesake’s Hudibras out of the list of my works, I should be robbed of my last shred of literary grievance, so I say nothing about this, but keep it secret, lest some worse thing should happen to me.  Besides, I have a great respect for my namesake, and always say that if Erewhon had been a racehorse it would have been got by Hudibras out of Analogy.  Someone said this to me many years ago, and I felt so much flattered that I have been repeating the remark as my own ever since.