Another failing of Butler’s, shared, I am sorry to say, by Mr. Jones, was a love of little jokes and an inability to see when and where they could be worked off, or perhaps I ought to say when they were worked out.  A great many of them were pinpricks rather than jokes; he only made them “to annoy.”  Well, they did, and they do, annoy—­not because they were jokes, but because they were feeble jokes.  “If it is thought desirable to have an article on the Odyssey, I have abundant, most aggravating and impudent matter about Penelope and King Menelaus”—­so he wrote to Mr. H. Quilter, who naturally jumped at it.  Here is another gem which Mr. Jones seems to admire:  “There will be no comfortable and safe development of our social arrangements—­I mean we shall not get infanticide, and the permission of suicide, nor cheap and easy divorce—­till Jesus Christ’s ghost has been laid.”

All that can be said for that is that it is vivacious, and that it has helped Mr. Shaw, who has certainly bettered the instruction.  There are others which are a good deal more annoying than that.  Jokes about infanticide and Jesus Christ defeat themselves, and always will.  They are on a level with jokes about death or one’s mother; they recoil and smite the smiter on the nose.  I confess that I find the joke about Charles Lamb irritating.  Butler said that he could not read Lamb because Canon Ainger went to tea with his (Butler’s) sisters.  His gibes at Dante are as bad—­in fact they are worse, aggravated by the fact that, having never read (he assures us) a word of him, he puts him down as one of the seven humbugs of Christendom.  He would not read Dante because he had liked Virgil, nor Virgil because Tennyson liked him.  “We are not amused,” as Queen Victoria said of another little joke.

The correspondence with Miss Savage, again, does not reveal a pleasant personality.  Indeed, the discomfort one gets from it is at times painful.  Mr. Jones says that she bored Butler, and I don’t wonder at it.  The wonder would rather be that she did not set his teeth on edge if it were not that he was nearly as bad as she was.  It is not a matter of facetiousness—­I dare say he never tired of that; and perhaps the thinness of the jokes—­little misreadings of hymns, things about the Mammon of Righteousness, and so on—­in a kind of way added to the fun of them.  It is their subject matter which offends.  They commonly turn upon the health of the respective parents and the chances of an attack carrying them off. Queste cose, as the hero said of the suicide, non si fanno.  But I suppose that if you could put your mother’s death-bed into a novel, you could do almost anything in that kind.