Less than a god, they thought, there could not dwell
Within the hollow of that shell
That spoke so sweetly and so well.

This was the second great event in his life, and henceforward Italy and Handel were always present at the bottom of his mind as a kind of double pedal to every thought, word, and deed.  Almost the last thing he ever asked me to do for him, within a few days of his death, was to bring Solomon that he might refresh his memory as to the harmonies of “With thee th’ unsheltered moor I’d trace.”  He often tried to like the music of Bach and Beethoven, but found himself compelled to give them up—­they bored him too much.  Nor was he more successful with the other great composers; Haydn, for instance, was a sort of Horace, an agreeable, facile man of the world, while Mozart, who must have loved Handel, for he wrote additional accompaniments to the Messiah, failed to move him.  It was not that he disputed the greatness of these composers, but he was out of sympathy with them, and never could forgive the last two for having led music astray from the Handel tradition and paved the road from Bach to Beethoven.  Everything connected with Handel interested him.  He remembered old Mr. Brooke, Rector of Gamston, North Notts, who had been present at the Handel Commemoration in 1784, and his great-aunt, Miss Susannah Apthorp, of Cambridge, had known a lady who had sat upon Handel’s knee.  He often regretted that these were his only links with “the greatest of all composers.”

Besides his love for Handel he had a strong liking for drawing, and, during the winter of 1853-4, his family again took him to Italy, where, being now eighteen, he looked on the works of the old masters with intelligence.

In October, 1854, he went into residence at St. John’s College, Cambridge.  He showed no aptitude for any particular branch of academic study, nevertheless he impressed his friends as being likely to make his mark.  Just as he used reminiscences of his own schooldays at Shrewsbury for Ernest’s life at Roughborough, so he used reminiscences of his own Cambridge days for those of Ernest.  When the Simeonites, in The Way of All Flesh, “distributed tracts, dropping them at night in good men’s letter boxes while they slept, their tracts got burnt or met with even worse contumely.”  Ernest Pontifex went so far as to parody one of these tracts and to get a copy of the parody “dropped into each of the Simeonites’ boxes.”  Ernest did this in the novel because Butler had done it in real life.  Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, of the University Library, has found, among the Cambridge papers of the late J. Willis Clark’s collection, three printed pieces belonging to the year 1855 bearing on the subject.  He speaks of them in an article headed “Samuel Butler and the Simeonites,” and signed A. T. B. in the Cambridge Magazine, 1st March, 1913; the first is “a genuine Simeonite tract; the other two are parodies.  All three are anonymous.  At the top of the second parody is written ‘By S. Butler, March 31.’” The article gives extracts from the genuine tract and the whole of Butler’s parody.