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Book Reviews Also, oddly enough in the multiple indexes, there is no primary mention of the important Butler collection presented by Carroll A. Wilson to the Chapin Library of Williams College, nor of its catalogue published in 1945, which has annotations of scholarly and bibliographical interest, other than the listing of a note about it in TLS. Perhaps this is because co-author Breuer seemingly disapproves of Wilson, for in his article "Samuel Butler in the United States: A Bibliographical Survey" published in the Samuel Butler Newsletter, VT: 1 (Williamstown, Massachusetts, May 1986, and cited here as item 1455), he wrote, "To collector and Butlerphile Carroll A Wilson, and many other American readers, B mattered mostly for what he represented in attitude and outlook rather than as a writer." On the other hand, the catalogue of another Butler collection, the one at St. John's College, Cambridge, is noted as entry 601, possibly because this was Butler's school. This secondary bibliography is another of the annotated series devoted to authors of the ELT period inaugurated more than twenty years ago under the general editorship of Helmut E. Gerber and basically (and perhaps too diligently) follows the pattern used in earlier volumes. In spite of a few flaws, it is certainly an important contribution to Butler scholarship and will be welcomed as an extremely useful tool by students of this frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted late-Victorian writer who, according to Walter Allen in The English Novel, will be long remembered if for nothing else than being the author of The Way of All Flesh, the progenitor of Bennett's Clayhanger, Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Maugham's Of Human Bondage, and Joyce's The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Edwin Gilcher Cherry Plain, New York The Torrid and the Frigid Ian Fletcher. Rediscovering Herbert Home: Poet, Architect, Typographer, Art Historian. Greensboro: ELT Press, 1990. xv + 188 pp. $25.00 WHEN FRANK KERMODE lectured in the early 1980s on "Botticelli Recovered," he borrowed freely from Ian Fletcher's biography-in-progress of Herbert Home. Kermode's lecture, published in 1985 as the first of three essays in Forms of Attention, argued that the taste for Botticelli 337 ELT: VOLUME 34:3, 1991 revived by Swinburne and Pater was conceived in ignorance but reinforced and secured by the scholarship of Home. An amateur all his life, having never studied in any academy whatsoever, Home converted mere taste and opinion into knowledge. Kermode's "Botticelli Recovered" questioned the significance of the academy and academics in canonformation . Fletcher's Rediscovering Herbert Home, posthumously completed and published by ELT Press, is less polemical than the essay that owed so much to it, but, like all of Fletcher's previous work, it tells us most of what is currently known—not merely opined—about its subject. It recovers and rediscovers Herbert Home, who was, as the subtitle says, a "Poet, Architect, Typographer, and Art Historian" of some repute at the turn of the century. Fletcher was the choice biographer of Home insofar as among contemporary scholars he was ablest to assess Home's many careers in distinct pockets of cultural history. To the extent that Home's life as told by Fletcher has a drama, it is his transformation from a London aesthete following upon Morris and Ruskin, through an association with the Decadent poets of the Nineties, into the fastidious scholar and aloof collector of Florence, friend of Roger Fry and Bernard and Mary Berenson. Early on Home rejected the action and discursiveness of the High Victorians, exalted the lyric and subjective, and formulated the late Romantic poetics of the Nineties. His poetry, a generous sample of which is included in chapter three, is not bad, showing eclectic influences of Herrick, Waller, Rossetti, and Morris, and anticipating in its competent and pleasant derivations the young Ezra Pound's. Interestingly—and perhaps suggestive of his transformation in later life—Home achieved what he apparently sought, not an original or personal voice but "a timeless diction," or an anonymous "Lyric" style. His involvement with the Nineties, however, was not limited to aesthetics, unless one takes the broader view of aesthetics to include that which...

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