Nor was this life of terror and pain lightened by any gracious or liberal influences. The world which Mr. Festing Jones exhibits to us in his opening chapters is full of the drabbest and most depressing horrors of Early Victorianism. Its measure can be taken by a single story which Butler preserved: Archdeacon Bather was lunching with my grandfather some two or three years after the Archdeacon had lost his first wife. Dr. Butler dearly loved a hard crust of bread baked nearly black, and it so happened that a piece was set by his plate with hardly any crust, and what little there was, very thin. My aunt, then Miss Butler, observing what had happened, at once said: "Oh, Papa, this won't do at all! I will find you a piece more to your liking." Whereon she went to the kitchen and returned with a crust baked exactly to Dr. Butler's taste. When Archdeacon Bather saw this he said to himself: "That is the young woman for me"; and shortly afterwards he proposed and was accepted. Readers will remember the scene in _The Way of All Flesh_ in which Theobald, driving away for his honeymoon, insists that Christina shall order their dinner at the first stop, and in which Christina protests with tears her nervousness, and Theobald replies, "It is a wife's duty to order her husband's dinner; you are my wife, and I shall expect you to order mine." A sensitive child, neglected or even ill-treated by its parents, might, if the relations of the parents between themselves had anything beautiful or kindly, see some possibilities of happiness in the institution of the family. But Samuel Butler was brought up in a world where no such possibilities seemed to exist. He came to believe, Mr. Festing Jones tells us, that, like Habakkuk, _le père de famille est capable de tout_. It has often been maintained that the greatest poets and artists do nothing throughout life but draw on those fresh and lovely impressions which they have gathered in childhood. When he was a child Butler acquired habits of suspicion against all those surrounding him who were not connected with him by freely-chosen bonds of friendship. Canon Butler bullied him on moral grounds; and he grew to suspect every claim made on him, every exhortation addressed to him, on moral grounds. Ernest Pontifex is described on one occasion as assuming the expression of a puppy which is being scolded for something it does not understand; and Butler did indeed develop some of the habits of an ill-treated dog. He shied and snarled at a lifted hand, which might have been lifted in kindness or in ignorance of his existence. Having, as he supposed, penetrated the fraud of the family, he felt a distrust of all human institutions. He suspected the world of being in a conspiracy to pretend that parents were naturally kind to their children, that Christ rose from the dead, and that Tennyson was a great poet. And, turning from all these discredited shows, he devoted