AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



(1889) 



And when I consider, in one view, the many things . . . 

 which I have upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being 

 employed in this manner at my time of life. But, in another 

 view, and taking in all circumstances, these things, as trifling 

 as they may appear, no less than things of greater importance, 5 

 seem to be put upon me to do. Bishop Butler to the Duchess 

 of Somerset. 



THE "many things" to which the Duchess's corre- 

 spondent here refers are the repairs and improvements 

 of the episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if the great 10 

 apologist, greater in nothing than in the simple dignity 

 of his character, would have considered the writing an 

 account of himself as a thing which could be put upon 

 him to do whatever circumstances might be taken in. 

 But the good bishop lived in an age when a man might 15 

 write books and yet be permitted to keep his private exist- 

 ence to himself; in the pre-Boswellian epoch, when the 

 germ of the photographer lay concealed in the distant 

 future, and the interviewer who pervades our age was an 

 unforeseen, indeed unimaginable, birth of time. 20 



At present, the most convinced believer in the aphorism 

 " Bene qu'i latuit, bene vixit" is not always able to act 

 up to it. An importunate person informs him that his 

 portrait is about to be published and will be accompanied 

 by a biography which the importunate person proposes to 25 

 write. The sufferer knows what that means; either he 



