He labored prodigiously to become a painter, and during his life he succeeded in having five pictures hung in the Royal Academy exposition. However, he never got out of Class C as a painter, and when he was forty-one he forsook the brush for the pen. Meanwhile he had (according to his father) killed his mother by the publication of "Erewhon," launched "The Fair Haven," got thoroughly enmeshed in the teachings of Darwin and the contentions of Mivart, Lamarck, and others, plunged into Hellenic literature to give it specificity of origin and display, and was otherwise very busy pushing over statues of heroes which he mistook for tin soldiers. Early in life he began keeping notes. His principle was that if you wanted to record a thought you had to shoot it on the wing. When he thought of or said anything especially illuminating or amusing, or heard any one else say anything of the sort, down it went. He was his own Boswell with all of that immortal's colloquiality and ingenuousness. He did not hesitate to make frank comments on the people he met, and photographic descriptions of such individuals, of his family and friends, and their letters went to make up the novel (if novel a narrative of fact can be called) through which he was made known to the general public, and by which he will probably be longest remembered, namely, "The Way of All Flesh." It was begun when he was thirty-one and finished fifteen years later. Because it is autobiographical, and biographical of his family and friends, he found the necessity of frequently rewriting it, as time, event, and God changed them. This is not the place to discuss the merits and demerits of that book. It had an artificial popularity--Mr. G. Bernard Shaw being the artificer. There was one thing about it concerning which every one agreed: to pillory your parents in public is the equivalent of beating them up in private. The fourth of Samuel Butler's characteristics was insensitiveness to what is generally called refinement or finer feeling. Though an artist he had little æsthetic awareness. If he knew the canons of good taste he did not subscribe to them. What he called his little jokes, which Mr. Jones relates with great gustfulness, is the ample proof of this accusation. "What is more subversive of a sultan's dignity than pinching his leg? Pinching his sultana's leg." "We shall not get infanticide, permission of suicide, cheap and easy divorce, and other social arrangements till Jesus Christ's ghost has been laid." Cheap and vulgar prostitution of intellectual possession a gentleman would call it.