China and the West

Butler, Samuel. Works.
1863
Butler, Samuel. A first year in Canterbury settlement. (London : Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863).
Chap. 2
Then a rocket was sent up, and the pilot came on board. He gave us a roaring republican speech on the subject of India, China, etc.
The captain yarns about California and the China seas—the doctor about Valparaiso and the Andes—another raves about Hawaii and the islands of the Pacific—while a fourth will compare nothing with Japan.

1865
Butler, Samuel. Lucubratio Ebria. In : Press ; July 29 (1865).
We are unable to point to any example of a race absolutely devoid of extra- corporaneous limbs, but we can see among the Chinese that with the failure to invent new limbs a civilisation becomes as much fixed as that of the ants; and among savage tribes we observe that few implements involve a state of things scarcely human at all. Such tribes only advance pari passu with the creatures upon which they feed.

1872
Butler, Samuel. Erewhon : or, Over the range. (London : Trübner, 1872).
Chap. 6
It was not at all like going to China or Japan, where everything that one sees is strange.
Chap. 15
One rule runs into, and against, another as in a most complicated grammar, or as in Chinese pronunciation, wherein I am told that the slightest change in accentuation or tone of voice alters the meaning of a whole sentence.

1879
Butler, Samuel. Evolution, old and new ; or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, as compared with that of Mr. Charles Darwin. (London : Hardwicke & Bogue, 1879).
In those climates where fecundity is greatest, as in China, Egypt, and Guinea, they banish, mutilate, sell, or drown infants.

1881
Butler, Samuel. Alps and sanctuaries of Piedmont and the canton Ticino. (London : A.C. Fifield, 1881).
I once saw a common cheap china copy of this Madonna announced as to be given away with two pounds of tea, in a shop near Hatton Garden.
The most university and examination ridden people in the world are the Chinese, and they are the least progressive.

1887
Butler, Samuel. Luck or cunning as the main means of organic modification : an attempt ot throw additional light upon the late Mr. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. (London : Trübner, 1887).
We know, of course, that it is not so, and that exemption from the toil attendant on material obstacles has been compounded for, in the ordinary way, by the single payment of a tunnel; and so with the cementing of a bone, our biologists say that the protoplasm, which is alone living, cements it much as a man might mend a piece of broken china, but that it works by methods and processes which elude us, even as the holes of the St. Gothard tunnel may be supposed to elude a denizen of another world.

1888
Butler, Samuel. The sanctuary of Montrigone. In : Universal review ; Nov. (1888).
She is not at all ill—in fact, considering that the Virgin has only been born about five minutes, she is wonderful; still the doctors think it may be perhaps better that she should keep her room for half an hour longer, so the bed has been festooned with red and white paper roses, and the counterpane is covered with bouquets in baskets and in vases of glass and china.

1889
Butler, Samuel. A medieval girl school. In : Universal review ; Dec. (1889).
As in the shops under the Colonnade where devotional knick-knacks are sold, you can buy a black china image or a white one, whichever you like; so with the pictures—the black and white are placed side by side—pagando il danaro si può scegliere.

1890
Butler, Samuel. Thought and language. Lecture London (1890).
The Chinese letters on a tea-chest might as well not be there, for all that they say to us, though the Chinese find them very much to the purpose. They are a covenant to which we have been no parties—to which our intelligence has affixed no signature.

1903
Butler, Samuel. The way of all flesh. (London : Jonathan Cape, 1903).
Chap. 1
How well do I remember her parlour half filled with the organ which her husband had built, and scented with a withered apple or two from the pyrus japonica that grew outside the house; the picture of the prize ox over the chimney-piece, which Mr Pontifex himself had painted; the transparency of the man coming to show light to a coach upon a snowy night, also by Mr Pontifex; the little old man and little old woman who told the weather; the china shepherd and shepherdess; the jars of feathery flowering grasses with a peacock’s feather or two among them to set them off, and the china bowls full of dead rose leaves dried with bay salt.
Chap. 86
His father and grandfather could probably no more understand his state of mind than they could understand Chinese, but those who know him intimately do not know that they wish him greatly different from what he actually is.

1913
Butler, Samuel. Gladstone as a financier. In : The notebooks of Samuel Butler. Selections arranged and ed. by Henry Festing Jones. (London : Fifield, 1913).
I said to my tobacconist that Gladstone was not a financier because he bought a lot of china at high prices and it fetched very little when it was sold at Christie's.
“Did he give high prices?” said the tobacconist.
“Enormous prices,” said I emphatically.
Now, to tell the truth, I did not know whether Mr. Gladstone had ever bought the china at all, much less what he gave for it, if he did; he may have had it all left him for aught I knew. But I was going to appeal to my tobacconist by arguments that he could understand, and I could see he was much impressed.