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MISS SAVAGE becomes an obsession. Some years ago when I was studying Butler for my critical work I had to fight hard to ward her off, because I knew nothing about her and Mr. Festing Jones wanted her for this monument which he has raised to the memory of his friend. She obsessed Butler to the extent of making him believe that a woman wrote Homer, and she has also obsessed myself to the point of making me give the above absurd title to this review. She was malicious, she admitted and gloried in her habit of lying, but she was feminine and feline, detestable and adorable. Mr. Festing Jones simply cannot trust himself to speak of her, and has clearly been at some pains to avoid her obsessive power. Butler was her victim, helpless under her hands as she dug out of him the obstinate humour which was necessary for the completion of her existence, perhaps in order to make the sharpness of her own wit endurable. Butler, on the other hand, owed her just as much because he could not live without obsessions, and at the time she turned up he was bored almost to the point of extinction with his beloved obsession of his father. Miss Savage's letters explain the strange power that came into this odd little man in middle life and left him after her death. The correspondence of these two is like that of Abelard and Heloise, only in this instance the protagonists are two queer little middle-aged persons in late-Victorian London.

Butler had been driven as far as New Zealand by the obsession of his father and he returned to England when he thought Darwin, by upsetting the Anglican faith, had made that country safe for him. He returned with an incubus, an impecunious friend whom he had undertaken to set on his feet. To this friend he gave a quarter of his income, partly out of absurd generosity and partly to avoid being like his father, who had effectively tied him up by making a reversion contingent. The Butlers, father and son, squabbled for years over money, and both thoroughly enjoyed it. They were nineteenth