"a Liberal or Radical." He was a fervid believer in religion (in his own way truly-see Sartor Resartus); and yet, for the public in general, he was simply to be called an infidel. He was most determinedly in himself the adherent of ideas, permanent and fixed; while to his enlightened admirers he knew far too much about the relativity of fancies for that. These same enlightened admirers, despite his own perpetual, most characteristic and peculiar cries, insisted on making him, too, only an abstract. And, for the abstracts, there is no such thing in existence as a concrete-a concrete in its own right, intrinsic, with its own sphere of immanent manifestation and concerted work. On the contrary, for them, all is extrinsic, relative, abstract, the result only of opinion, casual association. For such men there is no Ansich, only a Seynfüranderes-no truth, only an individual fancy. Carlyle was assuredly the opposite of all that.

LITERARY opinions of Mr. Darwin's own may, in further illustration, be referred to here. We are told of the novels, for instance, which are read to him. Novels, he says (i. 101), "have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists." In proof, he is very simple and honest, when, like all of us at first, High-school boy, or Boardingschool Miss, in regard to novels, he would have a law passed against their ending unhappily. It is in the same spirit he avows, "A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better" (what would one's wife say)! "He would on no account know beforehand how a story finished." He "generally kept to the books of the day, obtained from a circulating library." For all that, "Walter Scott and Miss Austen with Mrs. Gaskell were read and

re-read till they could be read no more." "He often spoke warmly in praise of Silas Marner;" but he did not care so much for the Mill on the Floss. Yet, after the scene where Mrs. Poyser puts her landlord to the rout and drives him before her with her knitting-needles, I know of nothing in all George Eliot so good as Mrs. Tulliver's visit, in the Mill on the Floss, to the enemy lawyer with

the propitiatory hen. Further, in fact, in the same novel, all about the Dobsons is in a similar vein, and excellent. It is curious that the very creatrix of all these characters spoke with disgust of the like of them in others. Moulder, the immortal Moulder, she actually shudders at. Yet, even with the Proudies (of course it is not meant to ignore or disparage here other admirable serious characters and purposes), is it certain that there is anything better in all Trollope than Dockwrath with Mr. Moulder and his fellow-bagmen in the Commercial Room of the Bull Inn, Leeds? I am sure, when one is dull, just to brighten one, one can go back to that scene again and again, though one fails, excellent as it is, to go through the whole novel (Orley Farm) even for a second time. Doubtless, it was only becoming in Miss Evans to play propriety and give herself the air of the "femme savante," when it was such a disgusting brute as that drunken bagman that was in front of her.

But as regards Mr. Darwin in a general literary reference, the summing up of his own, most candid and most accomplished, son, Mr. Francis, is, no doubt, the right one. "Charles Darwin," he says (i. 6), “had not the literary temperament which made Erasmus (the grandfather) a poet as well as a philosopher;" and (p. 125), "I do not think that his literary tastes and opinions were on a level with the rest of his mind." In fact, so far as what was concerned was a matter of reading or intellectual operation alone, then Mr. Darwin's own verdict on himself is the true one (ii. 150): Facts compel me to conclude that my brain was never formed for much thinking." He, surely, had himself in his eye when he exclaimed to Fox, "Geology is a capital science to begin with, as it requires nothing but a little reading, thinking, and hammering." It was not by reading, at all events, but practically, that he himself was

introduced to geology; and it was practically, though with reading of Lyell, that he continued its study in the Beagle. He declared himself, in the end, that he "owed to the voyage the real training or education of his mind;" which training and education, further, bekanntlich, concerned alone "geology and the host of living beings."

On what Mr. Darwin laments as his "curious loss of the higher æsthetic tastes," as, for example, that, "now for many years," as he says, I cannot endure to read a line of poetry I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me," one really in the circumstances cannot find it in one's heart to wonder much. It is a common experience that when some certain one pursuit is made the leading and absorbing one, all else fades around it into indifference; and as it was confessedly no natural taste, but only the goodwill of right action, that led him to music, pictures, and literature, one is not surprised to find Mr. Darwin's function and faculty narrowing themselves into that one theory which alone occupies him. There is no relative atrophy of the brain, as (p. 101) he supposes, and his intellect is not dwarfed; it only asserts itself finally, all else being concurrent thereto, in the single strain which nature in the beginning gave it. What the Beagle observation did for the scientist, and what the Beagle intercourse did for the man, lived in him, and manifested itself in his regard to the last. What only is to be lamented is the limitation and circumscription into which that which he was specially made for of natural history-unavoidably fell. sequent corollaries: those weak reflections philosophically in regard to design; and those still weaker, as of the commonest man of the day, in regard to positive religion.

the whole interest That and the con

I think it may be assumed now that we fairly see and understand Mr. Darwin: with his whole soul bent on the

observation of movement, but with a perfect goodwill to all else that was socially held good. He is the man strenuus, σTovdaios, of loving, affectionate heart, of family piety; of temper perfect in its sweetness, longsuffering, patience, in its modesty, graciousness, and courtesy; yet adamant in its firmness, courage, tenacity,—in its unmoving and immovable truth to principle. He is possessed, withal, of such an inward horror of the tiniest tip of injustice of such an inward loathing of the veriest verge of cruelty, that he trembles with apprehension before the arrangements of nature itself-an apprehension that, combined with the bee of his theory, leads to the young attitude to religion already in allusion.

On the whole, I know not that a single expression, as it were, can be adduced more typical of the entire man than this" Then should be 'peace on earth, goodwill to men,' which, by the way, I always think" (it is he himself speaks, i. 174) “the most perfect description of happiness that words can give."

This, surely, is very comprehensive and complete. Still it may be well to add here the illustration of one or two of the more striking personal traits recorded of Mr. Darwin by his son.

We have seen already an instance or two of what we may call the self-accusing, conscientious repentance of Mr. Darwin. He had no sooner been tempted to make somewhat light of the early influence on him of his grandfather's Zoonomia and of the reference to Lamarck, than, with shame from within, he is obliged to add that perhaps, after all, there may be something in both. respects. So, also, he has just told of being laughed at by the officers for quoting the Bible on board the Beagle, when he suddenly recollects that he has no business to compromise them, and instantly inserts the parenthesis ("though themselves orthodox "). We have seen, too,