It was always the author, the work of God, that interested him more than the book—­the work of man; the painter more than the picture; the composer more than the music.  “If a writer, a painter, or a musician makes me feel that he held those things to be lovable which I myself hold to be lovable I am satisfied; art is only interesting in so far as it reveals the personality of the artist.”  Handel was, of course, “the greatest of all musicians.”  Among the painters he chiefly loved Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Rembrandt, Holbein, Velasquez, and De Hooghe; in poetry Shakespeare, Homer, and the Authoress of the Odyssey; and in architecture the man, whoever he was, who designed the Temple of Neptune at Paestum.  Life being short, he did not see why he should waste any of it in the company of inferior people when he had these.  And he treated those he met in daily life in the same spirit:  it was what he found them to be that attracted or repelled him; what others thought about them was of little or no consequence.

And now, at the end of his life, his thoughts reverted to the two subjects which had occupied him more than thirty years previously—­ namely, Erewhon and the evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The idea of what might follow from belief in one single supposed miracle had been slumbering during all those years and at last rose again in the form of a sequel to Erewhon.  In Erewhon Revisited Mr. Higgs returns to find that the Erewhonians now believe in him as a god in consequence of the supposed miracle of his going up in a balloon to induce his heavenly father to send the rain.  Mr. Higgs and the reader know that there was no miracle in the case, but Butler wanted to show that whether it was a miracle or not did not signify provided that the people believed it to be one.  And so Mr. Higgs is present in the temple which is being dedicated to him and his worship.

The existence of his son George was an after-thought and gave occasion for the second leading idea of the book—­the story of a father trying to win the love of a hitherto unknown son by risking his life in order to show himself worthy of it—­and succeeding.

Butler’s health had already begun to fail, and when he started for Sicily on Good Friday, 1902, it was for the last time:  he knew he was unfit to travel, but was determined to go, and was looking forward to meeting Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Fuller Maitland, whom he was to accompany over the Odyssean scenes at Trapani and Mount Eryx.  But he did not get beyond Palermo; there he was so much worse that he could not leave his room.  In a few weeks he was well enough to be removed to Naples, and Alfred went out and brought him home to London.  He was taken to a nursing home in St. John’s Wood where he lay for a month, attended by his old friend Dr. Dudgeon, and where he died on the 18th June, 1902.