My dear Romanes,
We are very much grieved to hear such a bad account of your health. Would that we could achieve something more to the purpose than assuring you and Mrs. Romanes of our hearty sympathy with you both in your troubles. I assure you, you are much in our thoughts, which are sad enough with the news of Jowett's, I fear, fatal attack.
I am almost ashamed to be well and tolerably active when young and old friends are being thus prostrated.
However, you have youth on your side, so do not give up, and wearisome as doing nothing may be, persist in it as the best of medicines.
At my time of life one should be always ready to stand at attention when the order to march comes; but for the rest I think it well to go on doing what I can, as if F. M. General Death had forgotten me. That must account for my seeming presumption in thinking I may some day "take up the threads" of late evolutionary speculation.
Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
My wife joins with me in love and kind wishes to you both.
[At the request of his friends, Huxley wrote for the "Nineteenth Century" a brief appreciation of his old comrade Tyndall—the tribute of a friend to a friend—and, difficult task though it was, touched on the closing scene, if only from a chivalrous desire to do justice to the long devotion which accident had so cruelly wronged:—]
I am comforted [he writes to Sir J. Hooker on January 3] by your liking the Tyndall article. You are quite right, I shivered over the episode of the "last words," but it struck me as the best way of getting justice done to her, so I took a header. I am glad to see by the newspaper comments that it does not seem to have shocked other people's sense of decency.