The love is almost pathetically lavish. Letters like these reveal to us a man so avid of affection that he must of necessity erect every barrier and defence to avoid a mortal wound. His sensibility was _rentrée_, probably as a consequence of his appalling childhood; and the indication helps us to understand not only the inordinate suspiciousness with which he behaved to Darwin, but the extent to which irony was his favoured weapon. The most threatening danger for such a man is to take the professions of the world at their face value; he can inoculate himself only by irony. The more extreme his case, the more devouring the hunger to love and be loved, the more extreme the irony, and in Butler it reached the absolute maximum, which is to interpret the professions of the world as their exact opposite. As a reviewer of the _Note-Books_ in _The Athenæum_ recently said, Butler's method was to stand propositions on their heads. He universalised his method; he applied it not merely to scientific propositions of fact, but, even more ruthlessly, to the converse of daily life. He divided up the world into a vast majority who meant the opposite of what they said, and an infinitesimal minority who were sincere. The truth that the vast majority are borderland cases escaped him, largely because he was compelled by his isolation to regard all his honest beliefs as proven certainties. That a man could like and admire him and yet regard him as in many things mistaken and wrong-headed was strictly incomprehensible to him, and from this angle the curious relations which existed between him and Dr Richard Garnett of the British Museum are of uncommon interest. They afford a strange example of mutual mystification.