2nd April, 1880:  My dear Mr. Butler:  I don’t think you see all that I do in the poem, and I am afraid that the suggestion of a dark secret in the poet’s life is not so very obvious after all.  I was hoping you would propose to devote yourself for a few months to reading the Excursion, his letters, &c., with a view to following up the clue, and I am disappointed though, to say the truth, the idea of a crime had not flashed upon me when I wrote to you.  How well the works of great men repay attention and study!  But you, who know your Bible so well, how was it that you did not detect the plagiarism in the last verse?  Just refer to the account of the disappearance of Aaron (I have not a Bible at hand, we want one sadly in the club) but I am sure that the words are identical [I cannot see what Miss Savage meant. 1901.  S. B.] Cassell’s Magazine have offered a prize for setting the poem to music, and I fell to thinking how it could be treated musically, and so came to a right comprehension of it.

Although Butler, when editing Miss Savage’s letters in 1901, could not see the resemblance between Wordsworth’s poem and Numbers XX., he at once saw a strong likeness between Lucy and Moore’s heroine whom he had been keeping in an accessible pigeon-hole of his memory ever since his letter about Miss Frances Power Cobbe.  He now sent Lucy to keep her company and often spoke of the pair of them as probably the two most disagreeable young women in English literature—­an opinion which he must have expressed to Miss Savage and with which I have no doubt she agreed.

In the spring of 1888, on his return from photographing the statues at Varallo, he found, to his disgust, that the authorities of the British Museum had removed Frost’s Lives of Eminent Christians from its accustomed shelf in the Reading Room.  Soon afterwards Harry Quilter asked him to write for the Universal Review and he responded with “Quis Desiderio . . .?” In this essay he compares himself to Wordsworth and dwells on the points of resemblance between Lucy and the book of whose assistance he had now been deprived in a passage which echoes the opening of Chapter V of Ex Voto, where he points out the resemblances between Varallo and Jerusalem.

Early in 1888 the leading members of the Shrewsbury Archaeological Society asked Butler to write a memoir of his grandfather and of his father for their Quarterly Journal.  This he undertook to do when he should have finished Ex Voto.  In December, 1888, his sisters, with the idea of helping him to write the memoir, gave him his grandfather’s correspondence, which extended from 1790 to 1839.  On looking over these very voluminous papers he became penetrated with an almost Chinese reverence for his ancestor and, after getting the Archaeological Society to absolve him from his promise to write the memoir, set about a full life of Dr. Butler, which was not published till 1896.  The delay was caused partly by the immense quantity of documents he had to sift and digest, the number of people he had to consult and the many letters he had to write, and partly by something that arose out of Narcissus, which we published in June, 1888.