One of the things that is most difficult to forgive a biographer is the wealth of sordid details they give us about our gods. Who can forgive Ranieri, for instance, for having told us with so much particularity that Leopardi hated to change his shirt or to take a bath, that he had a passion for cheap sweets, that he insisted upon keeping the servants of the household where he was a guest up until midnight in order that he might have his principal meal, that he was morbidly susceptible to adulation? It does not advantage any one to know such things, even if they are true, and if it serves any laudable purpose I am not aware that it has been set forth. Mr. Jones's biography is painfully candid and distressingly frank and confidential. Samuel Butler's life was one of rebellion and resignation, of contention and strife, of unhappiness and unyieldingness, of disappointment and suspicion, of wrongheartedness and rightmindedness, of rude energy and crude revery. He had a vanity of his intellectual capacity that transcends all understanding and a passion for what he called doing things thoroughly. He believed in the music of Handel, in the art of Giovanni Bellini, and his credo was the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, which apotheosizes charity and humility. Samuel Butler may have had charity and humility on his lips, but I fail to find from reading his biography that they ever got as far as his heart. He had an unhappy childhood, a perturbed adolescence, a lonely and isolated early manhood, an obsessed maturity, and an emotionally sterile old age. He hated his father, he pitied his mother, he barely tolerated his sisters, and he suspected the integrity and motives of his illustrious contemporaries who, though polite to him, personally ignored him controversially. Indeed, part of the time he must have felt himself a modern, though tame Ishmael, his hand against every man, and every man's hand against him. Although he had a few forgiving, appreciative friends, a constant and ardent mistress, and a devoted servant who mothered and domineered him, engrossing interests and boundless energy, still he was chronically unhappy, the sweetness of his soul being embittered by contempt of his fellow men. The offspring of a narrow-minded, obstinate, inflexible, selfish father and a gentle, reverential, yielding, and kindly mother, it was taken for granted that he would follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and become a clergyman. He found when he began to take thought that he could not accept the Christian miracles or believe in a personal, anthropomorphic God. So he went to New Zealand and became a successful sheep-grazer, and within five years he had more than doubled the four thousand pounds which he had been able to screw from his father.