is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance, Huxley. I am therefore a poor critic: a paper or book, when first reid, generally excites my admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points" (an admission that significantly tells the whole story). "My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited" (in such abstract there are no moving objects to be seen and watched); "and therefore I could never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics." In regard to metaphysics there is a similar implication in an allusion to Janet (iii. 46): "As for M. Janet, he is a metaphysician, and such gentlemen are so acute that I think they often misunderstand common folk." Again, in the same reference, more explicitly he tells us (i. 69): “I read a good deal during these two years on various subjects, including some metaphysical books; but I was not well-fitted for such studies" (the conscientious selfimprovement was still going on). His son says once: "In August he records that he read a good deal of various amusing books" and "paid some attention to metaphysical subjects." Metaphysics and amusement ! Yet, surely, it is amusing to learn (ii. 8) that his theory of natural selection would lead to the study of the whole of metaphysics. "My theory," he says there, "would give zest to recent and fossil comparative anatomy; it would lead to the study of instincts, heredity, and mind-heredity, whole of metaphysics." As yet, then, the study (metaphysics) has not been even led to, but, God be thanked! it will soon now be complete through knowledge of— instincts and heredity -mind-heredity! As regards mathematics, here is another avowal of his own (i. 46): "I attempted mathematics-but I got on very slowly-the work was repugnant to me, chiefly from my not being what he meant, so thought it safest to give my view as almost the same as his), and he says he is not sure he understands it"?

able to see any meaning in the early steps in algebra -I do not believe that I should ever have succeeded beyond a very low grade." His friend Herbert (i. 171) gives similar testimony: "He had, I imagine, no natural turn for mathematics, and he gave up his mathematical reading before he had mastered the first part of algebra, having had a special quarrel with Surds and the Binomial Theorem." Algebra, as so impalpable, might very well. have proved impracticable to Mr. Darwin; but why should he not have been at home in Geometry? He had "intense satisfaction" in Euclid, he says: there were things, shapes, to look at there, had there been but some movement in them, as there is in beetles! Mr. Darwin is mournful at times over his own deficiencies as (ii. 150) to his friend Fox: " facts compel me to conclude that my brain was never formed for much thinking." Yet his tenacity was such that by diligence and assiduity he could take into his memory-though only for the moment -pretty well whatever he pleased-as indeed we have already seen. Thus (i. 22) he could learn, "with great facility, forty or fifty lines of Virgil or Homer while in morning chapel," but " every verse was forgotten in forty-eight hours!" So it was also that, as we have seen, requiring to go to Cambridge, and finding that he "had actually forgotten, incredible as it may appear, almost everything which he had learnt, even to some few of the Greek letters," he yet soon contrived to recover his "school-standard of knowledge," and otherwise so to prepare himself as to pass, very creditably and respectably, his various examinations.

We hear of him reading "a little of Gibbon's history in the morning;" but there is no evidence of even as much as that abiding with him. He is in effect always to be found lamenting his unfortunate incapacity for what we may call book-work or indoors head-work.

"During my whole life I have been singularly incapable of mastering any language." So he loses Greek, even to some few of the letters. Latin-in that regard it is suggestive that he says (i. 385): "A boy who has learnt. to stick at Latin and conquer its difficulties-ought to be able to stick at any labour!" When eager on a

scheme about the Canary Islands, he applies himself to Spanish; but he finds it "intensely stupid." When it was proposed to him to become Secretary to the Geological Society, he is obliged to refer to his "ignorance of all languages, not knowing how to pronounce a single word of French: it would be disgraceful to the Society to have a Secretary who could not read French." The success of his theory in Germany is such that a very great number of books in that language are of the intensest interest to him, and he manages to mine his way in them to a meaning at times; but he confesses (ii. 278) to Professor Bronn" I read German very slowly. When any reasoning comes in, I find German excessively difficult to understand." More of his troubles with, as he called it (with an English v), the verdammte language, we can learn from i. 126 of the Life and Letters. It is here à propos of German that it is said, " he had a bad ear for vocal sounds;" but inability to pronounce even a "single word of French" is a still stronger testimony to the same effect. It is scarcely possible to imagine a more striking proof of the predominance of the eyes over the ears, or at least of the marked inferiority of the latter to the former on the part of Mr. Darwin.

CHAPTER XI.

CHARLES DARWIN- -CONTINUED.

IN further illustration here, we may refer to the decisions of Mr. Darwin himself in regard to celebrated or notorious contemporaries whom he had met in society. He mentions Lyell, Robert Brown, Sir J. Herschel, Humboldt, Sydney Smith, Macaulay, Motley, Grote, Babbage, Buckle, Carlyle. "Carlyle sometimes went on too long. on the same subject-he silenced every one-Babbage, and Lyell, both of whom liked to talk-by haranguing without stop or pause, during a whole meal, on the advantages of silence. Carlyle sneered at almost every one in my house one day he called Grote's History 'a fetid quagmire, with nothing spiritual about it.' I always thought that his sneers were partly jokes, but this now seems rather doubtful I believe that his benevolence was real, though stained by not a little jealousy." He speaks of Carlyle's hearty laugh, and does justice to "his extraordinary power of drawing pictures of things and men-far more vivid, as it seems to me, than any drawn by Macaulay. Whether his pictures of men were true ones is another question." "His mind seemed to me a very narrow one." "He thought it a most ridiculous thing that any one should care" about the movements of a glacier. "He laughed to scorn the idea that a mathematician, such as Whewell, could

judge, as I maintained he could, of Goethe's views on light."

As concerns light, the question is of quality and not of quantity; and, so far, a pure mathematician, as a pure mathematician, as a non-expert, is out of court. But surely Whewell was much more than a pure mathematician. I do not know that-socially-Carlyle was ever much more than he would have been, if, with all his gifts and books, he had remained, like Jean Paul, in his mother's kitchen. I do not know that, in the true sense (in any sense, indeed, but in so far as he was a well-educated man of good intellect), Carlyle ever became a gentleman, or even exactly what we call emphatically, perhaps, a man.1 His laugh, so much talked of, was, after all, as it were, a scholastic laugh, or a laugh on scholastic principles (i.e. from the teeth outwards)—witness Jean Paul's laugh in Sartor Resartus at the proposal of a castiron king rather than the jolly, hearty guffaw of a man who laughs simply as tickled to the marrow by humour. But Carlyle, besides being a great genius, a literary genius, that is, of the purest water, was a man that thought and felt intensely as to all that, theoretically, concerned truth and, morally, right; and so, consequently, he was unhappy in his time. theory came to be dominant in it. to him hateful, how (to him) his Mill, whom he despised, foisted his abstract copy-lines on

Mere physical, material It was wonderful, and shallow contemporary,

1 "Just as we never think that we know a man in his self, if we only know his Geist (for that, as always the higher, is always in a measure something so much the more impersonal, something independent of him, independent of his will), or just as we believe ourselves to know a man's self only when we know his heart: so is God truly personal to us only in revelation" (Schelling, xiv. 26).

The Geist may be one thing, but the clay is always another: and, after all, it was to expiscation of the clay that Carlyle himself was about the first to prompt us.