(the standard ten volumes of eighteenth-century miscellaneous poetry) and you will find; though, of course, if you only look for bad things you will find them, too, in plenty. But even this collection is by no means exhaustive, and with some of the more famous verse-writers it does not deal at all; while we have in this survey confessedly left most of them alone. What has been intended is to show that making of the common uncommon by means of treatment in verse was not an unknown thing between 1700 and 1800; that it was attempted and achieved in various kinds. Finally, if the attempts were rarely and the achievements hardly ever in kinds that can be called the very highest, one may at least urge that there is not an absolute vacuum between the loftiest mountain-tops of poetry and the actual plain of prose--that Parnassus has lower slopes, some of which are not so _very_ low SAMUEL BUTLER[6] [6] _Samuel Butler: a Memoir. By H. Festing Jones. 2 vols. Macmillan. 42s. net._ By EDWARD SHANKS Samuel Butler was a philosopher whose favourite doctrine was expressed in the words _pas trop de zèle_; and he spent a great part of his life complaining a little too eagerly that the world was not sufficiently zealous in the appreciation of his works. His reception and his reputation did indeed deserve a considerable part of the almost excessive attention which he lavished on them; for at this moment, now that the first is accomplished and the second enormous, they make a very curious subject for study. In his notebooks they occur again and again as themes for his meditation. "I am the _enfant terrible_," he says, "of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them." "I have chosen the fighting-road," he says elsewhere, "rather than the hang-on-to-a-great-man road, and what can a man who does this look for except that people should try to silence him in whatever way they think will be most effectual? In my case they have thought it best to pretend that I am non-existent." There is something pathetic in the spectacle of a man pursuing "the fighting-road" with no one to fight him and heaving bricks into the middle of persons who obstinately continue to ignore his existence. There is something more pathetic in the spectacle of an original thinker and a great wit sitting down in isolation to pen these apologies for his obscure position, always affecting to be indifferent to it and never deceiving anyone. For Butler was not indifferent to his lack of success. Had his been a true and not an assumed indifference he could not have returned to the subject so often as he does and in so many keys. He betrays himself again and again beyond mistake. He was an intensely, a morbidly sensitive man, one to whom success would have been very pleasant. He was damaged, and confirmed in oddity, by the want of it.