'The Butterfly', English, c. 1795

[Samuel Butler, Fellow of St John's, Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry (1774-1839)], 'The Butterfly: a Periodical Paper by an undergraduate of the University of Cambridge', numbers 1 and 2. The first issue of this 'essay-magazine' after the manner of The Spectator or The Rambler dwells on the author's motives for venturing into print. The second inveighs against human forms of the 'torpedo fish'. The full texts are published by permission of his grandson Samuel Butler the artist and author in The Eagle 15, 437-41. Butler was an undergraduate at St John's from 1792 to 1796. Briefly a Fellow, he was for thirty-eight years Headmaster of Shrewsbury School. He was Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry from June 1836, the archdeaconry of Coventry being annexed to the see of Worcester that December.