feel, the better for us all. There is no fear of any of us
forgetting when the acute stage is passed. I should be ashamed of
myself for having felt as keenly and spoken with as little reserve
as I have if it were any one but you; but I feel no shame at any
length to which grief can take me when it is about you. I can call
to mind no word which ever passed between us three which had been
better unspoken: no syllable of irritation or unkindness; nothing
but goodness and kindness ever came out of you, and such as our best
was we gave it to you as you gave yours to us. Who may not well be
plunged up to the lips in sorrow at parting from one of whom he can
say this in all soberness and truth? I feel as though I had lost an
only son with no hope of another....'

The love is almost pathetically lavish. Letters like these reveal to us
a man so avid of affection that he must of necessity erect every barrier
and defence to avoid a mortal wound. His sensibility was _rentrée_,
probably as a consequence of his appalling childhood; and the indication
helps us to understand not only the inordinate suspiciousness with which
he behaved to Darwin, but the extent to which irony was his favoured
weapon. The most threatening danger for such a man is to take the
professions of the world at their face value; he can inoculate himself
only by irony. The more extreme his case, the more devouring the hunger
to love and be loved, the more extreme the irony, and in Butler it
reached the absolute maximum, which is to interpret the professions of
the world as their exact opposite. As a reviewer of the _Note-Books_ in
_The Athenæum_ recently said, Butler's method was to stand propositions
on their heads. He universalised his method; he applied it not merely to
scientific propositions of fact, but, even more ruthlessly, to the
converse of daily life. He divided up the world into a vast majority who
meant the opposite of what they said, and an infinitesimal minority who