father, it was part of the gigantic plot to undo him. And yet he pretended to find comfort in the refusal. "I confess also," he wrote, "that it is a pleasure to me to be under no sort of obligation to Cambridge; if Cambridge honours the name of Darwin, it is not likely to honour me." He could not get the honoured name out of his mind for an hour. He thought unto the end that his books were boy cotted by men of science, "but," as Mr Jones sadly observes, "beyond straws showing the direction of the wind, he had nothing definite to go upon." Straws were enough for him. "My new book,' he writes in 1880, "will give old Darwin the best warming that I can arrange to give him, and I think I shall manage a pretty hot

one."

The worst of it was for Butler that the mania of persecution filled him also with malice and suspicion. A man who had been Darwin's friend was ever after Butler's enemy. This is what he thought it humorous to write as late as 1902: "A lady told me that she was on the top of a 'bus one afternoon and saw Leslie Stephen oross in front of the 'bus in an undecided sort of way, whereon the driver said, 'Now then, come up, monkey !' I wonder that the earth did not open and swallow him up! What a pity that Leslie Stephen should be so deaf." It is pitiful, this rancour, kept in bottle for more than twenty years.

And it was the same temper that made Butler believe that people were always scowling at or ridiculing him. When he lectured upon Homer, he saw

the Miss Butchers "glaring" at him, which is absurd, and he went about London with his moral nature wrapped in a cheap cloak of melodrama. He was misunderstood; he was slighted; and while he would have you believe that he cared not a jot for any man's opinion, his sensitive skin was scratched daily. "No schoolmaster," says he with his usual petulance, "after 'Erewhon' and 'The Fair Haven,' would dare to give any book of mine as a prize." Why, indeed, should any schoolmaster select his books for this benign purpose? How furious would Butler have been if he had done it! And what would the wretched schoolboy have thought if he had received one of them as the guerdon of his industry?

The explanation of Butler's character is that he was an intensely vain man, who had missed the world's appreciation. He admits to Miss Savage that he liked flattery, even when he saw through it, and flattery he wanted and too often missed. It was this love of flattery which made him depend, for the most part, upon the society of his inferiors. There is far too much in Mr Jones's Memoir about a servant, called Alfred, who seems to have governed all Butler's uprisings and

downsittings. For those of his contemporaries whom he might have met upon equal terms, he entertained a profound contempt. What he seems to have asked for in his associates was a ready agreement with his views, a quick admiration of his works. There is a kind of pathos in Mr Jones's universal acquiescence. More than once, when Butler asked what he thought of his prose or his music, he replied, "Of course I liked it." Of course he did. Otherwise, he could not have remained Butler's friend for a week. And to be a friend of Butler, a man must have put a whole-hearted ungrudging faith in many strange oreeds. He must have believed that Blake, and Dante, and Virgil, and Tennyson, were outside the pale of discussion. He must have believed that the Darwins were malign and wicked men. He must have harboured no doubt that a woman wrote the 'Odyssey.' These are some of the articles of faith to which every friend of Butler's was asked to subscribe, and it is not surprising that he had to depend upon the kindness of few.

And the sad part of it is that Butler's arrogant suspicion was but a shield for a very real humility. He would not acknowledge to the world that he was fallible. He knew it well enough in his heart of hearts. "Above all things," he once wrote, "let no unwary reader believe in me. In that I write at all I am among the damned. If he must believe

in anything, let him believe in the music of Handel, the painting of Gentile Bellini, and in the thirteenth chapter of St Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians." These three things are good to believe in, and probably, when Butler was alone, they were enough for him. In the presence of others, what was necessary was a community of hate. Butler hated almost as many things as Hazlitt says Wordsworth hated. He hated all the poets except Homer and Shakespeare, although he had read very few of them. He hated Rossetti and his face and his manner and his poetry and his friends. He hated Goethe and Carlyle, as well he might. He hated Lamb because Ainger had edited his works. He hated all men of science because they were not hostile to Darwin; and he hated all scholars because none of them believed that the 'Odyssey was written by Nausicaa. have never read, and never, I am afraid, shall read," he wrote, "a line of Keats or Shelley er Coleridge or Wordsworth, except such extracts as I occasionally see in a Royal Academy Catalogue." Nor did he see that his ignorances and his hatreds proved, not his oleverness, but the grave limitations of his intelligence. Only a fool or a charlatan condemns what he has never read out of the depth of his own "superiority." And despite, or perhaps on account of, the catholicity of his hatred, Butler had in him

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Radical. In his circumscribed assurance he resembled Mr Bernard Shaw. When you find a man revolting loudly against the middle class, you know that he is irrevocably merged within it. Butler was a homoeopath and an antivaccinator. But he wrote 'Erewhon' and 'The Way of

Montreal!' and therefore let us forget his 'Odyssey' and his 'Note-books' and his manifold vanities and ill-tempers. Let us even be grateful to Mr H. F. Jones, who has allowed us to see, through a cloud of irrelevancies, the portrait of an arrogant, wayward, and talented man.

PARK ROYAL, N.W. Empty huts, deserted parade-grounds, overgrown lawns, occasional daffodils. There in the April sunshine and showers of Peace year the Russian Relief Force was born.

Imagine the stupendous and inspiring drama of the year of tragedy, 1914, restaged in miniature.

The setting and the costumes are the same. The same crowds invade the deserted camp. Out from the obscurity of the streets of the cities and the lanes of freshening country, they come to this camp set in a suburb of London. From all borders, all counties, all shires they come, strange in their dialects, strange in their garb, strange in their first shyness. They hide, as the race ever does, emotion and feeling.

Just a handful at first-perhaps twenty or thirty; but behind and around them one sees the ghosts of the faraway days of early war. They materialise in one's vision. The arts, the professions, the trades, each pouring out its torrent of men, marching awkwardly, solemnly, clad in every variety of civilian clothing.

Then with a tremor and the

I.

These are the ghosts of the men who have passed - the men whose splendid virility, whose promise of fruitful

manhood lies in the bosom of France.

And it is here, in their silent and invisible presence, that the curtain rises on another drama-shall we call it-The Little Adventure.

Who are these men? Perhaps to the outsider's eye they look much the same as the men of 1914. They are still in mufti. Worn clothes, jackets in which the pockets droop pitiably, collars devoid of ties, ties to which no collars give effect, baggy trousers, boots thin and cracked. Derby hats of pre-war vintage, caps of faded hues, even the "decayed Homburg hat,"five years older and sensibly more decayed. They still look anything but soldiers.

Why are they here? What is it in the past that calls them back-in the memories of shell-swept roads at night, with hurrying silent men and rattling limbers-in the desolation of mud and wire seen from some post by the cold light of flares of the flies that rise from some deserted trench as one walks down it -of the scream and crash of the barrage-of red, gaping, ghastly wounds and of death.

What seek these men? Is it the spirit of adventure dominant above all else? Is it humanitarianism that leads them to succour a nation in distress? Is it that they have probed the mirage of civilian life, and buffeted and bruised they drift back to the old familiar things?

Only the inmost heart of the man can answer these questions.

They are a motley crew. Here a late Major with the Distinguished Service Order; he commanded a battery of field-guns at Ypres in 1917.

The natural question that arises is why such an expedition to North Russia was necessary or expedient. The amazing events of the closing months of 1918-the downfall of German power, the armistice, the Peace Conferencesufficed completely to occupy the publio mind, and few, if any, remembered that in far away Russia a handful of British troops had since May 1918 kept Germany from acquiring and utilising the Murmansk coast as a submarine base; and further, and far more important, had arrested the flow of German troops to the Western front at a most critical junoture—namely, the conclusion of the German offensive in the spring. From September 1917, German divisions had been transferred from Russia to France and Belgium at an average rate of six per month. But from the moment British troops landed in June to September, when the tide in France had turned and the Germans were obliged, in spite of all risks, to send reinforcements westward, not a single German division was withdrawn from Russia. During this period Hindenburg asked urgently for ten divisions to be sent to him from this