278 THE PASTOBAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



works of art. Two such works do honour to Austraha 

 and New Zealand. Samuel Butler, a grandson of 

 another Samuel Butler, who held the high office of 

 head-master of the famous Shrewsbury School and was 

 afterwards Bishop of Lichfield, was a jackeroo, or 

 cadet, on a sheep station in the Canterbury Province 

 of New Zealand and lived not very far, we gather, 

 from another station which was adorned by a genuine 

 Hterary pair, Mr. (later. Sir Frederick) Napier Broome 

 and Lady Barker. Mr. Butler was one of the many 

 good scholars of whom New Zealand can boast, and, 

 like Andrew Lang, he rendered both the Iliad and the 

 Odyssey into simple and melodious prose. He was 

 also a philosopher, of the scientific sort, and, while 

 fully accepting the general theory of evolution, he 

 beheved that Darwin's statement of the doctrines of 

 natural selection could be improved and supplemented. 

 Having a strong behef in the universahty of intelh- 

 gence, he apprehended that cunning, rather than chance, 

 as Darwin contended, was the key to the acquisition 

 by animal species of new characters. In a succession 

 of works, carefully numbered O'p. 3, 4, 6, etc., hke the 

 works of musical composers, he elaborated his not quite 

 novel, but freshly stated and independent views. He had 

 musical gifts and sympathies and wrote a cantata, 

 which was set to music. He was a painter and exhibited 

 at the Royal Academy, but, by his own candid admis- 

 sion, without ever attaining the success he dreamed of. 

 Lastly, he was an " original," and he was an attractive, 

 but paradoxical, figure in the London professional 

 society of the seventies. He appeared to be always 

 originating new ideas, and every time he was met with, 

 as Goethe said of Schiller, he had invariably something 

 fresh to communicate. It was, perhaps, less sound 

 than the developments of the great German poet, but 

 it was ever bold and striking. Once he was full of a 

 project for ehminating death by means of natural 

 selection ; it was but the evolution of an idea adum- 

 brated in Erewhon. That " development," grimly said 



