Again, in that most charming lecture on Shakespeare, Ingersoll proves that Bacon did not write the plays, by picking out various detached passages of Bacon, which no one for a moment ever claimed revealed the genius of the man.
With equal plausibility we could prove that the author of Hamlet was a weakling, by selecting all the obscure and stupid passages, and parading these with the unexplained fact that the play opens with the spirit of a dead man coming back to earth, and a little later in the same play Shakespeare has the man who interviewed the ghost tell of "that bourne from whence no traveler returns." Even Shakespeare was not a genius all the time. And Ingersoll, the searcher for truth, borrowed from his friends, the priests, the cheerful habit of secreting the particular thing that would not help the cause in hand. But one of the best things in Ingersoll's character was that he realized his lapses and in private acknowledged them.
On reading the smooth, florid and plausible sophistry of Wilberforce, Ingersoll once said: "Be easy on Soapy Sam! A few years ago, a little shifting of base on the part of my ancestors, and I would probably have had Soapy Sam's job."
This resemblance of opposites makes a person think of that remark applied to Voltaire. "He was the father of all those who wear shovel-hats."
hen Thomas Huxley and his wife arrived in New York in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six, on a visit to the Centennial Exhibition, this interesting item was flashed over the country, "Huxley and his titled bride have arrived in New York on their wedding-journey."
This item caused Mr. and Mrs. Huxley—both of them royal democrats—more joy than did the most complimentary interview. At home they had left a charming little brood of seven children, three of them nearly grown-ups.
Huxley sent Tyndall, who a few months before had married a daughter of Lord Hamilton, the clipping and this note: "You see how that once I am in a democratic country I am pulling all the honors I can in my own direction." The next letter the Huxleys received from Tyndall was addressed, "Sir Thomas and Lady Huxley." Huxley never stood in much awe of the nobility; he evidently felt that there was another kind of which he himself in degree was heir. Huxley never had a better friend than Sir Joseph Hooker, and we see in his letters such postscripts as this:
"Dear Sir Joseph: Do come and dine with us; it is a month since we have seen your homely old phiz." And Sir Joseph replies that he will be on hand the next Sunday evening and offers this mild suggestion, "Scientific gents as has countenances as curdles milk should not cast aspersions on men made in image of Maker."
