Page:EB1911 - Volume 04.djvu/911

 ancestors it had an abundant offspring. A list of twenty-seven direct imitations of Hudibras in the course of a century may be found in the Aldine edition (1893). Complete translations of considerable excellence have been made into French (London, 1757 and 1819) by John Townley (1697–1782), a member of the Irish Brigade; and into German by D. W. Soltau (Riga, 1787); specimens of both may be found in R. Bell’s edition. Voltaire tried his hand at a compressed version, but not with happy results.

BUTLER, SAMUEL (1774–1839), English classical scholar and schoolmaster, and bishop of Lichfield, was born at Kenilworth on the 30th of January 1774. He was educated at Rugby, and in 1792 went to St John’s College, Cambridge. Butler’s classical career was a brilliant one. He obtained three of Sir William Browne’s medals, for the Latin (1792) and Greek (1793, 1794) odes, the medal for the Greek ode in 1792 being won by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1793 Butler was elected to the Craven scholarship, amongst the competitors being John Keate, afterwards headmaster of Eton, and Coleridge. In 1796 he was fourth senior op time and senior chancellor’s classical medallist. In 1797 and 1798 he obtained the members’ prize for Latin essay. He took the degree of B.A. in 1796, M.A. 1799, and D.D. 1811. In 1797 he was elected a fellow of St John’s, and in 1798 became headmaster of Shrewsbury school. In 1802 he was presented to the living of Kenilworth, in 1807 to a prebendal stall in Lichfield cathedral, and in 1822 to the archdeaconry of Derby; all these appointments he held with his headmastership, but in 1836 he was promoted to the bishopric of Lichfield (and Coventry, which was separated from his diocese in the same year). He died on the 4th of December 1839. It is in connexion with Shrewsbury school that Butler will be chiefly remembered. During his headmastership its reputation greatly increased, and in the standard of its scholarship it stood as high as any other public school in England. His edition of Aeschylus, with the text and notes of Stanley, appeared 1809–1816, and was somewhat severely criticized in the Edinburgh Review, but Butler was prevented by his elevation to the episcopate from, revising it. He also wrote a Sketch of Modern and Ancient Geography (1813, frequently reprinted) for use in schools, and brought out atlases of ancient and modern geography. His large library included a fine collection of Aldine editions and Greek and Latin MSS.; the Aldines were sold by auction, the MSS. purchased by the British Museum.

BUTLER, SAMUEL (1835–1902), English author, son of the Rev. Thomas Butler, and grandson of the foregoing, was born at Langar, near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, on the 4th of December 1835. He was educated at Shrewsbury school, and at St John’s College, Cambridge. He took a high place in the classical tripos of 1858, and was intended for the Church. His opinions, however, prevented his carrying out this intention, and he sailed to New Zealand in the autumn of 1859. He owned a sheep run in the Upper Rangitata district of the province of Canterbury, and in less than five years was able to return home with a moderate competence, most of which was afterwards lost in unlucky investments. The Rangitata district supplied the setting for his romance of Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872), satirizing the Darwinian theory and conventional religion. Erewhon had a sequel thirty years later (1901) in Erewhon Revisited, in which the narrator of the earlier romance, who had escaped from Erewhon in a balloon, finds himself, on revisiting the country after a considerable interval, the object of a topsy-turvy cult, to which he gave the name of “Sunchildism.” In 1873 he had published a book of similar tendency, The Fair Haven, which purported to be a “work in defence of the miraculous element in our Lord’s ministry upon earth” by a fictitious J. P. Owen, of whom he wrote a memoir. Butler was a man of great versatility, who pursued his investigations in classical scholarship, in Shakespearian criticism, biology and art with equal independence and originality. On his return from New Zealand he had established himself at Clifford’s Inn, and studied painting, exhibiting regularly in the Academy between 1868 and 1876. But with the publication of Life and Habit (1877) he began to recognize literature as his life work. The book was followed by three others, attacking Darwinism—Evolution Old and New, or the Theories of Buffon, Dr Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck as compared with that of Mr C. Darwin (1879); Unconscious Memory (1880), a comparison between the theory of Dr E. Hering and the Philosophy of the Unconscious of Dr E. von Hartmann; and Luck or Cunning (1886). He had a thorough knowledge of northern Italy and its art. In Ex Voto (1888) he introduced many English readers to the art of Tabachetti and Gaudenzio Ferrari at Varallo. He learnt nearly the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart, and translated both poems (1898 and 1900) into colloquial English prose. In his Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) he propounded two theories: that the poem was the work of a woman, who drew her own portrait in Nausicaa; and that it was written at Trapani, in Sicily, a proposition which he supported by elaborate investigations on the spot. In another book on the Shakespeare Sonnets (1899) he aimed at destroying the explanations of the orthodox commentators.

Butler was also a musician, or, as he called himself, a Handelian, and in imitation of the style of Handel he wrote in collaboration with H. Festing Jones a secular oratorio, Narcissus (1888), and had completed his share of another, Ulysses, at the time of his death on the 18th of June 1902. His other works include: Life and Letters (1896) of Dr Samuel Butler, his