is his own son who speaks, "that he got a kind of satisfaction in reading articles which he could not understand. For instance, he used to read nearly the whole of Nature, though so much of it deals with mathematics and physics." But that means the "good young man," too, who for "self-improvement" has interest in, and would have a try at, everything on earth that gives marks. He actually, as he says himself, "paid some attention to metaphysical subjects!" "But," he admits, “I was not well fitted for such studies." "I would never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics; "facts compel me to conclude that my brain was never formed for much thinking." All the more do we see here, even in such attempts, a proof of his natural tenacity. He was tenacious in his hospital attendance; he was tenacious in his shooting. It was tenacity made him silent on his palpitations of the heart before the ship sailed at all hazards, he simply would go. It was in the same mood that he wrote to his sister, "I daresay you expect I shall turn back at the Madeira; if I have a morsel of stomach left, I won't give up." He asks Mr. Wallace once (iii. 94), such and such questions being put, "what would you answer?" and adds, “ I could not answer, but should maintain my ground." So, when Huxley "demurs to his discussion on Classification, and says he has nailed his colours to the mast," Mr. Darwin can only set his teeth and (jokingly) declare, "I will sooner die than give up" (ii. 243). It is he himself, too, who says of himself, "I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men." And his son says of him, "It was his instinctive love of making out a difficulty which to a great extent kept him at work so patiently "-" he could not bear to be beaten "-" he often quoted the saying, 'It's dogged as does it,' and I think doggedness expresses his frame of mind almost better than perseverance." He

himself speaks (iii. 143) of "the intolerable desire he had not to be utterly baffled."

At

It is sufficiently remarkable that the same man that stood doggedly by his own self, was no less softly concessive to everybody else. We have but to remind ourselves in this respect of his own daughter's felicitous phrase, "the singular modesty and graciousness of his nature." And no doubt, generally speaking, one's own children are the best witnesses as to what may be called the distinctive peculiarity of one's character and conduct on the whole. If at all capable in themselves, they have certainly beside them the means of judgment. Of such evidence there is assuredly no want in the case of Mr. Darwin; and if we have not seen the whole of it, we have at least seen as much of it as is conclusively ample. The testimony here, it is right to point out, is exchanged too. If they speak well of him, he speaks well of them. Of Mrs. Darwin, he says once, "No one can be too kind to my dear wife, who is worth her weight in gold many times over." another time when, in reference to his health, he cannot help sighing out, "I hope my life may be very short," the reason that saddens him is, " for to lie on a sofa all day and do nothing but give trouble to the best and kindest of wives and good dear children is dreadful.” He is within a year of his death when he writes to Mr. Wallace, "I have everything to make me happy and contented, but life becomes very wearisome to me." Very different was his health both of body and of mind when, more than a score of years earlier, from a Water-Cure, as alluded to already, he wrote to his wife charmingly, "The weather is quite delicious. Yesterday, after writing to you, I strolled a little beyond the glade for an hour and a half, and enjoyed myself-the fresh yet dark green of the grand Scotch firs, the brown of the catkins of the old birches, with their white stems, and a fringe of distant

green from the larches, made an excessively pretty view. At last I fell fast asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing; and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed." These words are so charmingly descriptive, that we may give a brief space to an interpolation here of some other proofs (at least at one time) on Mr. Darwin's part of a general literary and intellectual power with which it has not been usual to credit him. It is from the Journal that I shall extract these. From p. 169, for example: "This was the first night which I passed under the open sky, with the gear of the recado (saddle of the Pampas) for my bed. There is high enjoyment in the independence of the Gaucho life-to be able at any moment to pull up your horse, and say, 'Here we will pass the night.' The death-like stillness of the plain, the dogs keeping watch, the gipsy-group of Gauchos making their beds round the fire, have left in my mind a stronglymarked picture of this first night, which will never be forgotten." From p. 20 this sentence is particularly striking: "A few fireflies flitted by us; and the solitary snipe, as it rose, uttered its plaintive cry; the distant and sullen roar of the sea scarcely broke the stillness of the night." One likes to hear Darwin giving way to feeling, as here (p. 26): "It is easy to specify the individual objects of admiration in these grand scenes; but it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind." This from p. 329 is good description: "We observed to the south a ragged cloud of a dark reddishbrown colour. At first we thought that it was smoke from some great fire; but we soon found it was a swarm of locusts-flying at a rate of ten or fifteen miles an hour

-filling the air from a height of twenty feet to that, as it appeared, of two or three thousand above the ground; ' and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle;' when they alighted, they were more numerous than the leaves in the field." From p. 457: "Overhead, numerous gannets, frigate-birds, and terns rest on the trees. The gannets, sitting on their rude nests, gaze at one with a stupid yet angry air. The noddies, as their name expresses, are silly little creatures. But there is one charming bird; it is a small, snow-white tern, which smoothly hovers at the distance of a few feet above one's head, its large black eyes scanning, with great curiosity, your expression. Little imagination is required to fancy that so light and delicate a body must be tenanted by some wandering fairy spirit." P. 289: "The yelping of the guid-guid, and the sudden whew-whew of the cheucau," sometimes come from afar off, and sometimes from close at hand; the little black wren of Tierra del Fuego occasionally adds its cry; the creeper (Oxyurus) follows the intruder screaming and twittering; the humming-bird may be seen every now and then darting from side to side, and emitting, like an insect, its shrill chirp; lastly, from the top of some lofty tree the indistinct but plaintive note of the white-tufted tyrantflycatcher (Myobius) may be noticed." P. 316: "It (the noise of the stones rattling over each other in the mountain torrents on the Cordilleras) was like thinking on time, where the minute that now glides past is irrecoverable so was it with these stones; the ocean is their eternity, and each note of that wild music told of one more step towards their destiny." What speaks there is quite a metaphysical imagination, and the reader who consults the original will find the passage much fuller in it, and consequently grander. On p. 322 there is another very splendid passage, the concluding words of which are

these: "I felt glad that I was alone it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full orchestra a chorus of the Messiah.'" Really, one feels penitent when one quotes all this! It was surely to some purpose that the young Darwin, even if imitatively, gave his attention. at college to music and painting-nay, surely it was to a very absolute purpose that the schoolboy read, in that old window in the thick walls of the schoolroom, all that best poetry of ours, from Shakespeare and Milton, and Thomson, Gray, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley. Darwin's diction, as we see, when need comes, is emphatically a literary one-let us think as we may, let Darwin himself think as he may, his reading must have sunk deep into him and, in effect, lived there.

Mr. Darwin calls himself to Mr. Galton a Liberal or Radical," and we have seen that with Captain Fitz-Roy he bore himself as a somewhat bigoted Whig. His son, again, expresses himself of his father's opinion on political matters, as though it was "formed rather by the way than with any serious amount of thought." On the part of Mr. Francis Darwin there is power in the reflection; and it is doubtless true, as much else also is that concerns his father's later weakened interest in every consideration whatever but that of the Origin of Species. Still there was a time when Charles Darwin could politically think. It is thus that his fresh young mind, at its earliest, feels and deliberates in regard to the first savages of whom he has experience. P. 229: "The perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegian tribes must for a long time retard their civilisation. As we see those animals whose instinct compels them to live in society and obey a chief are most capable of improvement, so is it with the races of mankind. Whether we look at it as a cause or a consequence, the more civilised always have the most artificial govern