My Dear Sir,

I am greatly obliged to you for so kindly sending me your essay, which I am sure will interest me much. With respect to our differences, though some of your remarks have been rather stinging, they have all been made so gracefully, I declare that I am like the man in the story who boasted that he had been soundly horsewhipped by a Duke.

Pray believe me,

Yours very sincerely,

Charles Darwin.

RECOLLECTIONS OF ROYALTIES
I

By royal I do not mean kings and emperors only, or queens and empresses. I should have very little to tell of them. But royal, as is well known, has a wider meaning. The families of all reigning sovereigns, whether grand dukes, dukes, princes, landgraves, electors, etc., are royalty, nay even certain mediatised families, families that have ceased to be reigning, and which are very numerous on the continent, claim the same status, and may therefore intermarry with royal princes and princesses. Princes and princesses may also marry persons who are not royalty, but in that case the marriage is morganatic—a perfectly good and legal form of marriage both from an ecclesiastical and civil point of view, only that the children of such marriages, though perfectly legitimate, cannot succeed to the throne: in many cases no great loss to them. It has been my good fortune to see a good deal of royalty during the whole of my life. I say good fortune on purpose, for, with all the drawbacks inherent in Court life, royal persons enjoy some great advantages. Their position is assured and well defined. It requires no kind of self-assertion, and wherever they appear, they have no equals, no rivals, and hardly any enviers. They know that their presence always gives pleasure, and that every kind word or look from them is highly appreciated. They seldom have any inducement to try to appear different from what they are, or to disguise what they think or feel. What is the use of being a bishop, Stanley used to say, except that you can speak your own mind! The same applies to crowned heads, and if some of them, and it may be some bishops also, do not avail themselves of this privilege, it is surely their own fault. No doubt, if a bishop wants to become an archbishop, he has to think twice about what he may and what he may not say. But a king or a prince does not generally want to become anything else, and as they want nothing from anybody, they are not likely to scheme, to flatter, or to deceive. Whatever people may say of the atmosphere of courts and the insincerity of courtiers, the sovereign himself, if only left to himself, if only seen in his own private cabinet, is generally above the vitiated atmosphere that pervades his palace, nor does he, as a rule, while speaking with perfect freedom himself, dislike perfect freedom in others.

Of course there are differences among royalty as well as among commonalty. Some sovereigns have become so accustomed to the daily supply of the very cheapest flattery, that the slightest divergence from the tone of their courtiers is apt to startle or to offend them. Still most human beings like fresh air.

And have we not known persons who display their mitres and shake their crosiers before our faces, far more than kings their crowns and their sceptres? There is a whole class of people in ordinary life who have become something, and who seem always to be thanking God that they are not as other men are. They have ceased to be what they were, quite unaware that even in becoming something, there ought always to be or to remain something that becomes or has become. They seem to have been created afresh when they were created peers, temporal or spiritual.

But we must not be unfair to these new creations or creatures. I have known bishops, and archbishops too, in England, who, to their friends, always remained Thirlwalls or Thomsons, and in the second place only Bishops of St. David’s or Archbishops of York. My friend Arthur Stanley never became a dean. He was always Stanley; Dean of Westminster, if necessary. If he had been what he ought to have been, Archbishop of Canterbury, he would never have ceased to be A. P. Stanley, his chuckle would always have been just the same, and if his admirers had presented him with a mitre and crosier, he would probably have put the mitre on his head sideways, and said to his friends what another bishop is reported to have said on a similar occasion: “Thank you, my friends, but a new hat and an alpaca umbrella would have been far more useful than a mitre and a crosier.” With regard to royal personages, they have the great advantage that they are to their business born. They have not become, they were born royal. I was much struck by the extraordinary power of observation of a French friend of mine, who, when in 1855 the Queen and the Empress Eugénie entered the Grand Opera at Paris together, and were received with immense applause, turned to his neighbour, an Englishman, and said: “Look at the difference between your Queen and our Empress.” They had both bowed most graciously, and then sat down. “Did you not observe,” he continued, “how the Empress looked round to see if there was a chair for her before she sat down. But your Queen, a born Queen, sat down without looking. She knew a chair must be there, as surely as she is Queen of England.”