Thanks to our intimacy with John Morley, I have enjoyed Dr. Butler's genial and generous friendship for many years, but until I read the first volume of his autobiography, entitled "Across the Busy Years," I had not realized that there were in him four racial strains—English, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish, writes F. W, Hirst in the Manchester "Guardian."
Dr. Butler is an Episcopalian but his mother was a Presbyterian, and as a boy he attended the Presbyterian church and Sunday school in the town of Paterson, New Jersey. Every Sunday evening every member of the family was expected to have learned one additional hymn, He was also compelled to learn the Westminster Shorter Catechism, with its 107 questions and answers, "all of which I was able to recite from end to end without mistake in March, 1873." This early training may well have aided Dr. Butler's prodigious memory, which has served him so well in his manifold activities.
Some years ago, when I was working on my still unfinished "Life and Letters of John Morley," Dr, Butler very kindly sent me a transcript of their correspondence, starting from the autumn of 1904, when Andrew Carnegie introduced there to one another.
Before long Morley had discovered, as he put it in another letter, that it was "no joke to be the Great Mogul's heir." Soon afterwards he and Mrs. Morley were congratulating their friend on his marriage. "I have often thought," he wrote, "that it was a pity you had not a comrade at your hearth, Life is only half a life without it, That we wish you, and therefore her, true and long felicity it is not needed that I should say. We are in the late twilight, but that does not lessen our warm sympathy with a friend in the meridian sun."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.