Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 3

by Thomas Henry Huxley

CHAPTER 3.16.

1895.

[I have often regretted that I did not regularly take notes of my father's conversation, which was striking, not so much for the manner of it—though that was at once copious and crisp,—as for the strength and substance of what he said. Yet the striking fact, the bit of philosophy, the closely knitted argument, were perfectly unstudied, and as in other most interesting talkers, dropped into the flow of conversation as naturally as would the more ordinary experiences of less richly stored minds.

However, in January 1895 I was staying at Eastbourne, and jotted down several fragments of talk as nearly as I could recollect them. Conversation not immediately noted down I hardly dare venture upon, save perhaps such an unforgettable phrase as this, which I remember his using one day as we walked on the hills near Great Hampden]:—"It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy."

[JANUARY 16.

At lunch he spoke of Dr. Louis Robinson's experiments upon simian characteristics in new-born children. He himself had called attention before to the incurved feet of infants, but the power of hanging by the hands was a new and important discovery. (Professor H.F. Osborn tells this story of his:—"When a fond mother calls upon me to admire her baby, I never fail to respond; and while cooing appropriately, I take advantage of an opportunity to gently ascertain whether the soles of its feet turn in, and tend to support my theory of arboreal descent.")

He expressed his disgust with a certain member of the Psychical Research Society for his attitude towards spiritualism]: "He doesn't believe in it, yet lends it the cover of his name. He is one of the people who talk of the 'possibility' of the thing, who think the difficulties of disproving a thing as good as direct evidence in its favour."

[He thought it hard to be attacked for] "the contempt of the man of science" [when he was dragged into debate by Mr. Andrew Lang's "Cock Lane and Common Sense", he saying in a very polite letter}: "I am content to leave Mr. Lang the Cock Lane Ghost if I may keep common sense." "After all," [he added], "when a man has been through life and made his judgments, he must have come to a decision that there are some subjects it is not worth while going into."

JANUARY 18.

I referred to an article in the last "Nineteenth Century", and he said]:—"As soon as I saw it, I wrote, 'Knowles, my friend, you don't draw me this time. If a man goes on attributing statements to me which I have shown over and over again—giving chapter and verse—to be the contrary of what I did say, it is no good saying any more.'"

[But would not this course of silence leave the mass of the British public believing the statements of the writer?]

"The mass of the public will believe in ten years precisely the opposite of what they believe now. If a man is not a fool, it does him no harm to be believed one. If he really is a fool, it does matter. There never was book so derided and scoffed at as my first book, "Man's Place in Nature", but it was true, and I don't know I was any the worse for the ridicule.

"People call me fond of controversy, but, as a fact, for the last twenty years at all events, I have never entered upon a controversy without some further purpose in view. As to Gladstone and his "Impregnable Rock", it wasn't worth attacking them for themselves; but it was most important at that moment to shake him in the minds of sensible men.

"The movement of modern philosophy is back towards the position of the old Ionian philosophers, but strengthened and clarified by sound scientific ideas. If I publish my criticism on Comte, I should have to re-write it as a summary of philosophical ideas from the earliest times. The thread of philosophical development is not on the lines usually laid down for it. It goes from Democritus and the rest to the Epicureans, and then the Stoics, who tried to reconcile it with popular theological ideas, just as was done by the Christian Fathers. In the Middle Ages it was entirely lost under the theological theories of the time; but reappeared with Spinoza, who, however, muddled it up with a lot of metaphysics which made him almost unintelligible.

"Plato was the founder of all the vague and unsound thinking that has burdened philosophy, deserting facts for possibilities, and then, after long and beautiful stories of what might be, telling you he doesn't quite believe them himself.

"A certain time since it was heresy to breathe a word against Plato; but I have a nice story of Sir Henry Holland. He used to have all the rising young men to breakfast, and turn out their latest ideas. One morning I went to breakfast with him, and we got into very intimate conversation, when he wound up by saying, 'In my opinion, Plato was an ass! But don't tell any one I said so.'"

We talked on geographical teaching; he began by insisting on the need of a map of the earth (on the true scale) showing the insignificance of all elevations and depressions on the surface. Secondly, one should take any place as centre, and draw about it circles of 50 or 100 miles radius, and see what lies within them; and note the extent of the influence exerted by the central point. At the same time, one should always compare the British Isles to scale. For instance, the Aegean is about as big as Britain; while the smallness of Judaea is remarkable. After the Exile, the Jewish part was about as big as the county of Gloucester. How few boys realise this, though they are taught classical geography.

"The real chosen people were the Greeks. One of the most remarkable things about them is not only the smallness, but the late rise of Attica, whereas Magna Graecia flourished in the eighth century. The Greeks were doing everything—piracy, trade, fighting, expelling the Persians. Never was there so large a number of self-governing communities.

"They fell short of the Jews in morality. How curious is the tolerant attitude of Socrates, like a modern man of the world talking to a young fellow who runs after the girls. The Jew, however he fell short in other respects, set himself a certain standard in cleanliness of life, and would not fall below it. The more creditable to him, because these vices were the offspring of the Semitic races among whom the Jew lived.

"There is a curious similarity between the position of the Jew in ancient times and what it is now. They were procurers and usurers among the Gentiles, yet many of them were singularly high-minded and pure. All too with an intense clannishness, the secret of their success, and a sense of superiority to the Gentile which would prevent the meanest Jew from sitting at table with a proconsul.

"The most remarkable achievement of the Jew was to impose on Europe for eighteen centuries his own superstitions—his ideas of the supernatural. Jahveh was no more than Zeus or Milcom; yet the Jew got established the belief in the inspiration of his Bible and his Law. If I were a Jew, I should have the same contempt as he has for the Christian who acted in this way towards me, who took my ideas and scorned me for clinging to them."

[January 21.

Yesterday evening he again declared that it was very hard for a man of peace like himself to have been dragged into so many controversies.] "I declare that for the last twenty years I have never attacked, but always fought in self-defence, counting Darwin, of course, as part of myself, for dear Darwin never could nor would defend himself. Before that, I admit I attacked —, but I could not trust the man." [A pause.] "No, there was one other case, when I attacked without being directly assailed, and that was Gladstone. But it was good for other reasons. It has always astonished me how a man after fifty or sixty years of life among men could be so ignorant of the best way to handle his materials. If he had only read Dana, he would have found his case much better stated than ever he stated it. He seemed never to have read the leading authorities on his own side."

[Speaking of the hesitation shown by the Senate of London University in grappling with a threatened obstacle to reform, he remarked]: "It is very strange how most men will do anything to evade responsibility."

[January 23.

At dinner the talk turned on plays. Mr. H.A. Jones had sent him "Judah", which he thought good, though] "there must be some hostility—except in the very greatest writers—between the dramatic and the literary faculties. I noticed many points I objected to, but felt sure they met with applause. Indeed in the theatre I have noticed that what I thought the worst blots on a piece invariably brought down the house."

[He remarked how the French, in dramatic just as in artistic matters, are so much better than the English in composition, in avoiding anything slipshod in the details, though the English artists draw just as well and colour perhaps better.

The following sketch of human character is not actually a fragment of conversation, though it might almost pass for such; it comes from a letter to Mrs. W.K. Clifford, of February 10, 1895:—]

Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse-nervousness, ass-stubbornness and camel-malice—with an angel bobbing about unexpectedly like the apple in the posset, and when they can do exactly as they please, they are very hard to drive.

[Whatever he talked of, his talk never failed to impress those who conversed with him. One or two such impressions have been recorded. Mr. Wilfrid Ward, whose interests lie chiefly in philosophy and theology, was his neighbour at Eastbourne, and in the "Nineteenth Century" for August 1896 has given various reminiscences of their friendly intercourse.

His conversation (he writes) was singularly finished, and (if I may so express it) clean cut; never long-winded or prosy; enlivened by vivid illustrations. He was an excellent raconteur, and his stories had a stamp of their own which would have made them always and everywhere acceptable. His sense of humour and economy of words would have made it impossible, had he lived to ninety, that they should ever have been disparaged as symptoms of what has been called "anecdotage."

One drawback to conversation, however, he began to complain of during the later seventies.]

It is a great misfortune [he remarked to Professor Osborn] to be deaf in only one ear. Every time I dine out the lady sitting by my good ear thinks I am charming, but I make a mortal enemy of the lady on my deaf side.

[In ordinary conversation he never plunged at once into deep subjects. His welcome to the newcomer was always of the simplest and most unstudied. He had no mannerisms nor affectation of phrase. He would begin at once to talk on everyday topics; an intimate friend he would perhaps rally upon some standing subject of persiflage. But the subsequent course of conversation adapted itself to his company. Deeper subjects were reached soon enough by those who cared for them; with others he was quite happy to talk of politics or people or his garden, yet, whatever he touched, never failing to infuse into it an unexpected interest.

In this connection, a typical story was told me by a great friend of mine, whom we had come to know through his marriage with an early friend of the family. "Going to call at Hodeslea," he said, "I was in some trepidation, because I didn't know anything about science or philosophy; but when your mother began to talk over old times with my wife, your father came across the room and sat down by me, and began to talk about the dog which we had brought with us. From that he got on to the different races of dogs and their origin and connections, all quite simply, and not as though to give information, but just to talk about something which obviously interested me. I shall never forget how extraordinarily kind it was of your father to take all this trouble in entertaining a complete stranger, and choosing a subject which put me at my ease at once, while he told me all manner of new and interesting things."

A few more fragments of his conversation have been preserved—the following by Mr. Wilfrid Ward. Speaking of Tennyson's conversation, he said:—

Doric beauty is its characteristic—perfect simplicity, without any ornament or anything artificial.

Telling how he had been to a meeting of the British Museum Trustees, he said:—]

After the meeting, Archbishop Benson helped me on with my great-coat. I was QUITE OVERCOME by this species of spiritual investiture. "Thank you, Archbishop," I said, "I feel as if I were receiving the pallium."

[Speaking of two men of letters, with neither of whom he sympathised, he once said:—]

Don't mistake me. One is a thinker and man of letters, the other is only a literary man. Erasmus was a man of letters, Gigadibs a literary man. A.B. is the incarnation of Gigadibs. I should call him Gigadibsius Optimus Maximus.

[Another time, referring to Dean Stanley's historical impressionability, as militating against his sympathies with Colenso, he said:—]

Stanley could believe in anything of which he had seen the supposed site, but was sceptical where he had not seen. At a breakfast at Monckton Milnes's, just at the time of the Colenso row, Milnes asked me my views on the Pentateuch, and I gave them. Stanley differed from me. The account of Creation in Genesis he dismissed at once as unhistorical; but the call of Abraham, and the historical narrative of the Pentateuch, he accepted. This was because he had seen Palestine—but he wasn't present at the Creation.

[When he and Stanley met, there was sure to be a brisk interchange of repartee. One of these occasions, a ballot day at the Athenaeum, has been recorded by the late Sir W.H. Flower:—

A well-known popular preacher of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, who had made himself famous by predictions of the speedy coming of the end of the world, was up for election. I was standing by Huxley when the Dean, coming straight from the ballot boxes, turned towards us.] "Well," [said Huxley], "have you been voting for C.?" ["Yes, indeed I have," replied the Dean.] "Oh, I thought the priests were always opposed to the prophets," [said Huxley.] "Ah!" replied the Dean, with that well-known twinkle in his eye, and the sweetest of smiles, "but you see, I do not believe in his prophecies, and some people say I am not much of a priest."

A few words as to his home life may perhaps be fitly introduced here. Towards his children he had the same union of underlying tenderness veiled beneath inflexible determination for what was right, which marked his intercourse with those outside his family.

As children we were fully conscious of this side of his character. We felt our little hypocrisies shrivel up before him; we felt a confidence in the infallible rectitude of his moral judgments which inspired a kind of awe. His arbitrament was instant and final, though rarely invoked, and was perhaps the more tremendous in proportion to its rarity. This aspect, as if of an oracle without appeal, was heightened in our minds by the fact that we saw but little of him. This was one of the penalties of his hard-driven existence. In the struggle to keep his head above water for the first fifteen or twenty years of his married life, he had scarcely any time to devote to his children. The "lodger," as he used to call himself at one time, who went out early and came back late, could sometimes spare half an hour just before or after dinner to draw wonderful pictures for the little ones, and these were memorable occasions. I remember that he used to profess a horror of being too closely watched, or of receiving suggestions, while he drew. "Take care, take care," he would exclaim, "or I don't know what it will turn into."

When I was seven years old I had the misfortune to be laid up with scarlet fever, and then his gift of drawing was a great solace to me. The solitary days—for I was the first victim in the family—were very long, and I looked forward with intense interest to one half-hour after dinner, when he would come up and draw scenes from the history of a remarkable bull-terrier and his family that went to the seaside, in a most human and child-delighting manner. I have seldom suffered a greater disappointment than when, one evening, I fell asleep just before this fairy half-hour, and lost it out of my life.

In those days he often used to take the three eldest of us out for a walk on Sunday afternoons, sometimes to the Zoological Gardens, more often to the lanes and fields between St. John's Wood and Hampstead or West End. For then the flood of bricks and mortar ceased on the Finchley Road just beyond the Swiss Cottage, and the West End Lane, winding solitary between its high hedges and rural ditches, was quite like a country road in holiday time, and was sometimes gladdened in June with real dog-roses, although the church and a few houses had already begun to encroach on the open fields at the end of the Abbey Road.

My father often used to delight us with sea stories and tales of animals, and occasionally with geological sketches suggested by the gravels of Hampstead Heath. But regular "shop" he would not talk to us, contrary to the expectation of people who have often asked me whether we did not receive quite a scientific training from his companionship.

At the Christmas dinner he invariably delighted the children by carving wonderful beasts, generally pigs, out of orange peel. When the marriage of his eldest daughter had taken her away from this important function, she was sent the best specimen as a reminder.]

4 Marlborough Place, December 25, 1878.

Dearest Jess,

We have just finished the mid-day Christmas dinner, at which function you were badly wanted. The inflammation of the pudding was highly successful—in fact Vesuvian not to say Aetnaic—and I have never yet attained so high a pitch in piggygenesis as on this occasion.

The specimen I enclose, wrapped in a golden cerecloth, and with the remains of his last dinner in the proper region, will prove to you the heights to which the creative power of the true artist may soar. I call it a "Piggurne, or a Harmony in Orange and White."

Preserve it, my dear child, as evidence of the paternal genius, when those light and fugitive productions which are buried in the philosophical transactions and elsewhere are forgotten.

My best wishes to Fred and you, and may you succeed better than I do in keeping warm.

Ever your loving father,

T.H. Huxley.

[Later on, however, the younger children who kept up the home at Marlborough Place after the elder ones had married or gone out into the world, enjoyed more opportunities of his ever-mellowing companionship. Strongly as he upheld the conventions when these represented some valid results of social experience, he was always ready to set aside his mere likes and dislikes on good cause shown; to follow reason as against the mere prejudice of custom, even his own.

Severe he might be on occasion, but never harsh. His idea in bringing up his children was to accustom them as early as possible to a certain amount of independence, at the same time trying to make them regard him as their best friend.

This aspect of his character is specially touched upon by Sir Leslie
Stephen, in a letter written to my mother in July 1895:—

No one, I think, could have more cordially admired Huxley's intellectual vigour and unflinching honesty than I. It pleases me to remember that I lately said something of this to him, and that he received what I said most heartily and kindly. But what now dwells most in my mind is the memory of old kindness, and of the days when I used to see him with you and his children. I may safely say that I never came from your house without thinking how good he is; what a tender and affectionate nature the man has! It did me good simply to see him. The recollection is sweet to me now, and I rejoice to think how infinitely better you know what I must have been dull indeed not more or less to perceive.

As he wrote to his son on his twenty-first birthday:—]

You will have a son some day yourself, I suppose, and if you do, I can wish you no greater satisfaction than to be able to say that he has reached manhood without having given you a serious anxiety, and that you can look forward with entire confidence to his playing the man in the battle of life. I have tried to make you feel your responsibilities and act independently as early as possible—but, once for all, remember that I am not only your father but your nearest friend, ready to help you in all things reasonable, and perhaps in a few unreasonable.

[This domestic happiness which struck others so forcibly was one of the vital realities of his existence. Without it his quick spirit and nervous temperament could never have endured the long and often embittered struggle—not merely with equanimity, but with a constant growth of sympathy for earnest humanity, which, in early days obscured from view by the turmoil of strife, at length became apparent to all as the tide of battle subsided. None realised more than himself what the sustaining help and comradeship of married life had wrought for him, alike in making his life worth living and in making his life's work possible. Here he found the pivot of his happiness and his strength; here he recognised to the full the care that took upon itself all possible burdens and left his mind free for his greater work.

He had always a great tenderness for children. "One of my earliest recollections of him," writes Jeffery Parker, "is in connection with a letter he wrote to my father, on the occasion of the death, in infancy, of one of my brothers. 'Why,' he wrote, 'did you not tell us before that the child was named after me, that we might have made his short life happier by a toy or two.' I never saw a man more crushed than he was during the dangerous illness of one of his daughters, and he told me that, having then to make an after-dinner speech, he broke down for the first time in his life, and for one painful moment forgot where he was and what he had to say. I can truly say that I never knew a man whose way of speaking of his family, or whose manner in his own home, was fuller of a noble, loving, and withal playful courtesy."

After he had retired to Eastbourne, his grandchildren reaped the benefit of his greater leisure. In his age his love of children brimmed over with undiminished force, unimpeded by circumstances. He would make endless fun with them, until one little mite, on her first visit, with whom her grandfather was trying to ingratiate himself with a vast deal of nonsense, exclaimed: "Well, you are the curioustest old man I ever seen."

Another, somewhat older, developed a great liking for astronomy under her grandfather's tuition. One day a visitor, entering unexpectedly, was astonished to find the pair of them kneeling on the floor in the hall before a large sheet of paper, on which the professor was drawing a diagram of the solar system on a large scale, with a little pellet and a large ball to represent earth and sun, while the child was listening with the closest attention to an account of the planets and their movements, which he knew so well how to make simple and precise without ever being dull.

Children seemed to have a natural confidence in the expression of mingled power and sympathy which, especially in his later years, irradiated his "square, wise, swarthy face" ("There never was a face, I do believe" (wrote Sir Walter Besant of the portrait by John Collier), "wiser, more kindly, more beautiful for wisdom and the kindliness of it, than this of Huxley."—The "Queen", November 16, 1895.), and proclaimed to all the sublimation of a broad native humanity tried by adversity and struggle in the pursuit of noble ends. It was the confidence that an appeal would not be rejected, whether for help in distress, or for the satisfaction of the child's natural desire for knowledge.

Spirit and determination in children always delighted him. His grandson Julian, a curly-haired rogue, alternately cherub and pickle, was a source of great amusement and interest to him. The boy must have been about four years old when my father one day came in from the garden, where he had been diligently watering his favourite plants with a big hose, and said: "I like that chap! I like the way he looks you straight in the face and disobeys you. I told him not to go on the wet grass again. He just looked up boldly, straight at me, as much as to say, 'What do YOU mean by ordering me about?' and deliberately walked on to the grass."

The disobedient youth who so charmed his grandfather's heart was the prototype of Sandy in Mrs. Humphry Ward's "David Grieve". When the book came out my father wrote to the author: "We are very proud of Julian's apotheosis. He is a most delightful imp, and the way in which he used to defy me on occasion, when he was here, was quite refreshing. The strength of his conviction that people who interfere with his freedom are certainly foolish, probably wicked, is quite Gladstonian."

A year after, when Julian had learned to write, and was reading the immortal "Water Babies", wherein fun is poked at his grandfather's name among the authorities on water-babies and water-beasts of every description, he greatly desired more light as to the reality of water-babies. There is a picture by Linley Sambourne, showing my father and Owen examining a bottled water-baby under big magnifying glasses. Here, then, was a real authority to consult. So he wrote a letter of inquiry, first anxiously asking his mother if he would receive in reply a "proper letter" that he could read for himself, or a "wrong kind of letter" that must be read to him.

Dear Grandpater,

Have you seen a Waterbaby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Can I see it some day?

Your loving

Julian.

To this he received the following reply from his grandfather, neatly printed, letter by letter, very unlike the orderly confusion with which his pen usually rushed across the paper—time being so short for such a multitude of writing—to the great perplexity, often, of his foreign correspondents.]

HODESLEA, STAVELEY ROAD, EASTBOURNE, March 24 1892.

My dear Julian

I never could make sure about that Water Baby. I have seen Babies in water and Babies in bottles; but the Baby in the water was not in a bottle and the Baby in the bottle was not in water.

My friend who wrote the story of the Water Baby, was a very kind man and very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as he did—There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things.

When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-deal seers and see things more wonderful than Water Babies where other folks can see nothing.

Give my best love to Daddy and Mammy and Trevenen—Grand is a little better but not up yet—

Ever

Your loving

Grandpater.

[Others of his family would occasionally receive elaborate pieces of nonsense, of which I give a couple of specimens. The following is to his youngest daughter:—]

Athenaeum Club, May 17, 1892.

Dearest Babs,

As I was going along Upper Thames

Street just now, I saw between Numbers 170 and 211 ( (primary parenthesis) but you would like to know what I was going along that odorous street for. Well, it was to inquire how the pen with which I am now writing—( (2nd parenthesis) you see it is a new-fangled fountain pen, warranted to cure the worst writing and always spell properly) (2nd parenthesis)—works, because it would not work properly this morning. And the nice young woman who took it from me—( (3rd parenthesis) as who should say you old foodle!) (3rd parenthesis) inked her own fingers enormously ( (4th parenthesis) which I told her I was pleased they were her fingers rather than mine) (4th parenthesis)—But she only smole. ( (5th parenthesis) Close by was another shop where they sold hose—( (6th or 7th parenthesis) indiarubber, not knitted)—( (nth parenthesis) and warranted to let water through, not keep it out); and I asked for a garden syringe, thinking such things likely to be kept by hosiers of that sort—and they said they had not any, but found they had a remnant cheap ( (nnth parenthesis) price 3 shillings) which is less than many people pay for the other hosiers' hose) (end of parentheses) a doorpost at the side of the doorway of some place of business with this remarkable notice:

RULING GIRLS WANTED.

Don't you think you had better apply at once? Jack will give you a character, I am sure, on the side of the art of ruling, and I will speak for the science—also of hereditary (on mother's side) instinct.

Well I am not sure about the pen yet—but there is no room for any more.

Ever your loving

Dad.

Epistolary composition on the model of a Gladstonian speech to a deputation on women's suffrage.

[The other is to his daughter, Mrs. Harold Roller, who had sent him from abroad a friend's autograph-book for a signature:—]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, November 1, 1893.

The epistle of Thomas to the woman of the house of Harold.

1. I said it was an autograph-book; and so it was.

2. And naughty words came to the root of my tongue.

3. And the recording angel dipped his pen in the ink and squared his elbows to write.

4. But I spied the hand of the lovely and accomplished but vagabond daughter.

5. And I smole; and spoke not; nor uttered the naughty words.

6. So the recording angel was sold;

7. And was about to suck his pen.

8. But I said Nay! give it to me.

9. And I took the pen and wrote on the book of the Autographs letters pleasant to the eye and easy to read.

10. Such as my printers know not: nor the postman—nor the correspondent, who riseth in his wrath and curseth over my epistle ordinary.

[This to his youngest daughter, which, in jesting form, conveys a good deal of sound sense, was the sequel to a discussion as to the advisability of a University education for her own and another boy:—]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, May 9, 1892.

Dearest Babs,

Bickers and Son have abased themselves, and assure me that they have fetched the Dictionary away and are sending it here. I shall believe them when it arrives.

As a rule, I do not turn up when I announce my coming, but I believe I shall be with you about dinnertime on Friday next (13th).

In the meanwhile, my good daughter, meditate these things:

1. Parents not too rich wish to send exceptionally clever, energetic lad to university—before taking up father's profession of architect.

2. Exceptionally clever, energetic lad will be well taught classics at school—not well taught in other things—will easily get a scholarship either at school or university. So much in parents' pockets.

3. Exceptionally clever, energetic lad will get as much mathematics, mechanics, and other needful preliminaries to architecture, as he wants (and a good deal more if he likes) at Oxford. Excellent physical school there.

4. Splendid Art museums at Oxford.

5. Prigs not peculiar to Oxford.

6. Don Cambridge would choke science (except mathematics) if it could as willingly as Don Oxford and more so.

7. Oxford always represents English opinion, in all its extremes, better than Cambridge.

8. Cambridge better for doctors, Oxford for architects, poets, painters, and-all-that-sort-of-cattle (all crossed out).

9. LAWRENCE WILL GO TO OXFORD and become a real scholar, which is a great thing and a noble. He will combine the new and the old, and show how much better the world would have been if it had stuck to Hellenism. You are dreaming of the schoolboy who does not follow up his work, or becomes a mere poll man. Good enough for parsons, not for men. LAWRENCE WILL GO TO OXFORD.

Ever your aggrawatin'

Pa.

[Like the old Greek sage and statesman, my father might have declared that old age found him ever learning. Not indeed with the fiery earnestness of his young days of stress and storm; but with the steady advance of a practised worker who cannot be unoccupied. History and philosophy, especially biblical criticism, composed his chief reading in these later years.

Fortune had ceased her buffets; broken health was restored; and from his resting-place among his books and his plants he watched keenly the struggle which had now passed into other hands, still ready to strike a blow if need be, or even, on rare occasions, to return to the fighting line, as when he became a leader in the movement for London University reform.

His days at Eastbourne, then, were full of occupation, if not the occupation of former days. The day began as early; he never relaxed from the rule of an eight o'clock breakfast. Then a pipe and an hour and a half of letter-writing or working at an essay. Then a short expedition around the garden, to inspect the creepers, tend the saxifrages, or see how the more exposed shrubs could best be sheltered from the shrivelling winds. The gravelled terrace immediately behind the house was called the Quarterdeck; it was the place for a brisk patrolling in uncertain weather or in a north wind. In the lower garden was a parallel walk protected from the south by a high double hedge of cypress and golden elder, designed for shelter from the summer sun and southerly winds.

Then would follow another spell of work till near one o'clock; the weather might tempt him out again before lunch; but afterwards he was certain to be out for an hour or two from half-past two. However hard it blew, and Eastbourne is seldom still, the tiled walk along the sea-wall always offered the possibility of a constitutional. But the high expanse of the Downs was his favourite walk. The air of Beachy Head, 560 feet up, was an unfailing tonic. In the summer he used to keep a look-out for the little flowers of the short, close turf of the chalk which could remind him of his Alpine favourites, in particular the curious phyteuma; and later on, in the folds of the hills where he had marked them, the English Gentians.

After his walk, a cup of tea was followed by more reading or writing till seven; after dinner another pipe, and then he would return to my mother in the drawing-room, and settle down in his particular armchair, with some tough volume of history or theology to read, every now and again scoring a passage for future reference, or jotting a brief note on the margin. At ten he would migrate to the study for a final smoke before going to bed.

Such was his routine, broken by occasional visits to town on business, for he was still Dean of the Royal College of Science and a trustee of the British Museum. Old friends came occasionally to stay for a few days, and tea-time would often bring one or two of the small circle of friends whom he had made in Eastbourne. These also he occasionally visited, but he scarcely ever dined out. The talking was too tiring.

The change to Eastbourne cut away a whole series of interests, but it imported a new and very strong one into my father's life. His garden was not only a convenient ambulatory, but, with its growing flowers and trees, became a novel and intense pleasure, until he began] "to think with Candide that 'Cultivons notre jardin' comprises the whole duty of man."

[It was strange that this interest should have come suddenly at the end of his life. Though he had won the prize in Lindley's botanical class, he had never been a field botanist till he was attracted by the Swiss gentians. As has been said before, his love of nature had never run to collecting either plants or animals. Mere "spider-hunters and hay-naturalists," as a German friend called them, he was inclined to regard as the camp-followers of science. It was the engineering side of nature, the unity of plan of animal construction, worked out in infinitely varying detail, which engrossed him. Walking once with Hooker in the Rhone valley, where the grass was alive with red and green grasshoppers, he said,] "I would give anything to be as interested in them as you are."

[But this feeling, unknown to him before, broke out in his gentian work. He told Hooker, "I can't express the delight I have in them." It continued undiminished when once he settled in the new house and laid out a garden. His especial love was for the rockery of Alpines, many of which came from Sir J. Hooker.

Here, then, he threw himself into gardening with characteristic ardour. He described his position as a kind of mean between the science of the botanist and the empiricism of the working gardener. He had plenty to suggest, but his gardener, like so many of his tribe, had a rooted mistrust of any gardening lore culled from books. "Books? They'll say anything in them books." And he shared, moreover, that common superstition, perhaps really based upon a question of labour, that watering of flowers, unnecessary in wet weather, is actively bad in dry. So my father's chief occupation in the garden was to march about with a long hose, watering, and watering especially his alpines in the upper garden and along the terraces lying below the house. The saxifrages and the creepers on the house were his favourite plants. When he was not watering the one he would be nailing up the other, for the winds of Eastbourne are remarkably boisterous, and shrivel up what they do not blow down.] "I believe I shall take to gardening," [he writes, a few months after entering the new house,] "if I live long enough. I have got so far as to take a lively interest in the condition of my shrubs, which have been awfully treated by the long cold."

[From this time his letters contain many references to his garden. He is astonished when his gardener asks leave to exhibit at the local show, but delighted with his pluck. Hooker jestingly sends him a plant "which will flourish on any dry, neglected bit of wall, so I think it will just suit you.">[

Great improvements have been going on (he writes in 1892), and the next time you come you shall walk in the "avenue" of four box-trees. Only five are to be had for love or money at present, but there are hopes of a sixth, and then the "avenue" will be full ten yards long! Figurez vous ca!

[It was of this he wrote on October 1:—]

Thank Heaven we are settled down again and I can vibrate between my beloved books and even more beloved saxifrages.

The additions to the house are great improvements every way, outside and in, and when the conservatory is finished we shall be quite palatial; but, alas, of all my box-trees only one remains green, that is the "amari," or more properly "fusci" aliquid.

[Sad things will happen, however. Although the local florists vowed that the box-trees would not stand the winds of Eastbourne, he was set on seeing if he could not get them to grow despite the gardeners, whom he had once or twice found false prophets. But this time they were right. Vain were watering and mulching and all the arts of the husbandman. The trees turned browner and browner every day, and the little avenue from terrace to terrace had to be ignominiously uprooted and removed.

A sad blow this, worse even than the following:—]

A lovely clematis in full flower, which I had spent hours in nailing up, has just died suddenly. I am more inconsolable than Jonah!

[He answers some gardening chaff of Sir Michael Foster's:—]

Wait till I cut you out at the Horticultural. I have not made up my mind what to compete in yet. Look out when I do!

[And when the latter offered to propose him for that Society, he replied:—]

Proud an' 'appy should I be to belong to the Horticultural if you will see to it. Could send specimens of nailing up creepers if qualification is required.

[After his long battlings for his early loves of science and liberty of thought, his later love of the tranquil garden seemed in harmony with the dignified rest from struggle. To those who thought of the past and the present, there was something touching in the sight of the old man whose unquenched fires now lent a gentler glow to the peaceful retirement he had at length won for himself. His latter days were fruitful and happy in their unflagging intellectual interests, set off by the new delights of the succidia altera, that second resource of hale old age for many a century.

All through his last and prolonged illness, from earliest spring until midsummer, he loved to hear how the garden was getting on, and would ask after certain flowers and plants. When the bitter cold spring was over and the warm weather came, he spent most of the day outside, and even recovered so far as to be able to walk once into the lower garden and visit his favourite flowers. These children of his old age helped to cheer him to the last.

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