Sir: Dictionaries of quotations are fallible, as Sir Denis Brogan
says (Letters, 31 January), and they must sometimes take one another's attributions on trust. So he is less than cock- sure in refuting Mr Braby's suggestion that Montagu Butler was the author of 'even the youngest of us.' And they both write, or at any rate are printed as writing, Montague. One can forgive Mr Braby in his headlong pursuit of accuracy, but Sir Denis lives at Cambridge!
W. H. Thompson's remark is so very famous
and has been so often fathered upon H. M. Butler that you may possibly welcome fresh evidence. Thompson had already just become a professor when my father went up to Cam- bridge; Butler on the contrary took the classical tripos only two years ahead of my father, and they remained friends and in frequent contact until Butler's death sixty years later. Confusion between the two was made even more im- possible by the fact that Butler had been Master
- of Trinity for only about twenty years when my father first passed on the happy thought to me and gave Thompson the credit. Nor did he ever quote his friend Butler as having said anything quite so discomfiting.
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