Some of his readers complain that they often do not know whether he is serious or jesting. He wrote of Lord Beaconsfield: "Earnestness was his greatest danger, but if he did not quite overcome it (as indeed who can? it is the last enemy that shall be subdued), he managed to veil it with a fair amount of success." To veil his own earnestness he turned most naturally to humour, employing it in a spirit of reverence, as all the great humorists have done, to express his deepest and most serious convictions. He was aware that he ran the risk of being misunderstood by some, but he also knew that it is useless to try to please all, and, like Mozart, he wrote to please himself and a few intimate friends. I cannot speak at length of his kindness, consideration, and sympathy; nor of his generosity, the extent of which was very great and can never be known--it was sometimes exercised in unexpected ways, as when he gave my laundress a shilling because it was "such a beastly foggy morning"; nor of his slightly archaic courtliness-- unless among people he knew well he usually left the room backwards, bowing to the company; nor of his punctiliousness, industry, and painstaking attention to detail--he kept accurate accounts not only of all his property by double entry but also of his daily expenditure, which he balanced to a halfpenny every evening, and his handwriting, always beautiful and legible, was more so at sixty-six than at twenty-six; nor of his patience and cheerfulness during years of anxiety when he had few to sympathize with him; nor of the strange mixture of simplicity and shrewdness that caused one who knew him well to say: "II sait tout; il ne sait rien; il est poete." Epitaphs always fascinated him, and formerly he used to say he should like to be buried at Langar and to have on his tombstone the subject of the last of Handel's Six Great Fugues. He called this "The Old Man Fugue," and said it was like an epitaph composed for himself by one who was very old and tired and sorry for things; and he made young Ernest Pontifex in The Way of all Flesh offer it to Edward Overton as an epitaph for his Aunt Alethea. Butler, however, left off wanting any tombstone long before he died. In accordance with his wish his body was cremated, and a week later Alfred and I returned to Woking and buried his ashes under the shrubs in the garden of the crematorium, with nothing to mark the spot. The Humour of Homer {59}