ABSTRACT
This chapter examines that Butler follows a similar practice of copious compilation, but that for this late seventeenth-century reader the commonplace book method was far from disagreeable; instead it offered her the space to cultivate ideas about friendship, marriage, courage, beauty, death, conscience, and contentment, among others, expressed in the pithy rhymes which could be arranged at will. In addition, Butler shows an interest in longer works, some of them which may have been appreciated for a formal issues as well as their content. Little is known about wife, Anne, a daughter and co-heiress of Sir Valentine Knightley, of Fawsley, Northamptonshire. She wrote prose and poetry in the volume from 1696 to at least 1719. He was the eldest son of Richard Chetwode, Esquire, of Chetwode, Buckinghamshire, and Oakley, Staffordshire, and his wife, Anne, a daughter and co-heiress of Sir Valentine Knightley, of Fawsley, Northamptonshire.
