It was no doubt well that Mr. Jones's sincerity should be probed; and this is in fact what Butler does at his best. He challenges established opinions and forces those who hold them to consider whether they have any good ground for doing so. But the reader who is not dazzled by Butler's originality of judgment in this instance will ask himself whether the sentence which Mr. Jones quotes is anything more than a very facile assertion. He will then perhaps ask himself how often Butler's original pronouncements on established reputations are of the same order. He will certainly find some. In the _Note-books_ there is an elaborate arraignment of Raphael. It may not be convincing; but the critic has produced his arguments. Here, also, may be found Butler's explanation of his hostility towards post-Handelian music. But one may search the two volumes of the biography for a considerable time without finding his appreciation of any book published in his own time. Here, again, we must be just: Butler did like one book. It was called _Pusley, or My Summer in a Garden_; its author was Charles Dudley Warner; and Butler said, "I like _Pusley_ very much and have read it all." But the majority of his opinions are on the model of the much-quoted passage in the _Note-books_: Talking it over, we agreed that Blake was no good because he learnt Italian at sixty in order to study Dante, and we knew 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. That is an exceedingly witty way of expressing an indolent prejudice; and those who share that particular chain of prejudices may well rejoice in it, without supposing that it proves their case. But this particular form of humour and Butler's independence of attitude would be slightly more entertaining if he had occasionally replaced the reputations he smashed with these hammer-strokes by some discovery of his own. Unfortunately, it is not easy to remember any unknown author whom he brought into the light--unless Nausicaa be taken as an example.