Mr. Jones and Alfred, clerk, valet, and general attendant, "a live young thing about the place, and a cheerful addition to 15 Clifford's Inn," became very intimate with Butler. Mr. Jones had been a barrister, but had abandoned the law and was under a modest retainer of two hundred a year from Butler to give him Boswellian service. They found Butler companionable, and there are such indications as letters from casual acquaintances, particularly in Italy, to show that he was agreeable and sympathetic to some persons. Aside from these there is very little in these two massive volumes to testify to the kindness, gentleness, simpleness, and humility of Samuel Butler. Apparently he disliked every one with whom he had to do or with whom he came in contact, save Mr. Pauli, Mr. Faesch, Lord Beaconsfield, and Richard Garnett. Still he was pleased with Mr. Garnett's discomfiture on hearing his lecture on "The Humor of Homer." Searching Mr. Jones's plethoric volumes carefully, it is difficult to find kind or appreciative words for contemporary or forebear. "How many years was it before I learned to dislike Thackeray or Tennyson as much as I do now?" "Middlemarch is a long-winded piece of studied brag." "What a wretch Carlyle must be to run Goethe as he has done!" "We talked about Charlotte Brontë; Butler did not like her." "I do not like Mr. W. J. Stillman at all." "I do not remember that Edwin Lear told us anything particularly amusing." "All I remember about John Morley is that I disliked and distrusted him." "I dislike Rossetti's face and his manner and his work, and I hate his poetry and his friends." "No, I do not like Lamb; you see Canon Anger writes about him, and Canon Anger goes to tea with my sisters." "Blake was no good because he learned Italian at over sixty in order to read Dante, and we know Dante was no good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because Tennyson ran him, and as for Tennyson, well, Tennyson goes without saying." "I said I was glad Stanley was dead." "I never read a line of Marcus Aurelius that left me wiser than I was before." Speaking of Maeterlinck, who was then coming to his estate, "Now a true genius cannot so soon be recognized. If a man of thirty-five can get such admiration he is probably a very good man, but he is not one of those who will redeem Israel." Though Butler was fascinated by G. Bellini, he surely had heard of Raphael. Darwin, Wallace, Ray Lankester, most of the scientists of his time who did not fully agree with him; novelists, philosophers, artists, poets--all excited his disapproval. When he was fifty-three he made a note to remind himself to call Tennyson the Darwin of poetry and Darwin the Tennyson of science. Thus would he empty the vials of his wrath and contempt.