and mother sent him.  Nor was Butler, even as a copyist, always adequate to his originals.  The brilliantly witty letters of Miss Savage, by which the first volume is made precious, seem to us to indicate a real woman upon whom something more substantial might have been modelled than the delightful but evanescent picture of Alethea Pontifex.  Here, at least, is a picture of Miss Savage and Butler together which, to our sense, gives some common element in both which escaped the expression of the author of The Way of all Flesh:—­

’I like the cherry-eating scene, too [Miss Savage wrote after reading the MS. of Alps and Sanctuaries], because it reminded me of your eating cherries when I first knew you.  One day when I was going to the gallery, a very hot day I remember, I met you on the shady side of Berners Street, eating cherries out of a basket.  Like your Italian friends, you were perfectly silent with content, and you handed the basket to me as I was passing, without saying a word.  I pulled out a handful and went on my way rejoicing, without saying a word either.  I had not before perceived you to be different from any one else.  I was like Peter Bell and the primrose with the yellow brim.  As I went away to France a day or two after that and did not see you again for months, the recollection of you as you were eating cherries in Berners Street abode with me and pleased me greatly.’

Again, we feel that the unsubstantial Towneley of the novel should have been more like flesh and blood when we learn that he too was drawn from the life, and from a life which was intimately connected with Butler’s.  Here, most evidently, the heart gains what the head loses, for the story of Butler’s long-suffering generosity to Charles Paine Pauli is almost beyond belief and comprehension.  Butler had met Pauli, who was two years his junior, in New Zealand, and had conceived a passionate admiration for him.  Learning that he desired to read for the bar, Butler, who had made an unexpected success of his sheep-farming, offered to lend him L100 to get to England and L200 a year until he was called.  Very shortly after they both arrived in England, Pauli separated from Butler, refusing even to let him know his address, and thenceforward paid him one brief visit every day.  He continued, however, to draw his allowance regularly until his death all through the period when, owing to the failure of Butler’s investments, L200 seems to have been a good deal more than one-half Butler’s income.  At Pauli’s death in 1897 Butler discovered what he must surely at moments have suspected, that Pauli had been making between L500 and L800 at the bar, and had left about L9000—­not to Butler.  Butler wrote an account of the affair after Pauli’s death which is strangely self-revealing:—­