Samuel Butler (1835-1902) as a literary critic and commentator

The solving of problems and the attacking of falsehood were the twin tasks which Samuel Butler, scholar and iconoclast, set for himself in his considerations of literary works. He was stimulated to his finest scholarly achievements by the enticing problems which he found in Homer and Shakespeare; he also fancied that there was plenty of falsehood to attack in the form of unmerited literary reputations. [...]