s and sweeping statements, the reduction of numberless
superlatives to positives, and asserts that if, as a young man, he
had fallen in with Huxley's writings before Bacon's, they would have
produced the same effect upon him.

Huxley's own criticism of the one and only poem be ever published
is also instructive. On his way back from the funeral of Tennyson in
Westminster Abbey, he spent the journey in shaping out some lines on
the dead poet, the germ of which had come into his mind in the Abbey.
These, with a number of other tributes to Tennyson by professed poets,
were printed in the _Nineteenth Century_ for November, 1892. He writes
in a private letter:--

If I were to pass judgment upon it in comparison with the
others, I should say that as to style it is hammered, and as
to feeling, human.

They are castings of much prettier pattern and of mainly
poetico-classical educated-class sentiment. I do not think
there is a line of mine one of my old working-class audience
would have boggled over.

As regards the arts other than literary, he had a keen eye for a
picture or a piece of sculpture, for, in addition to the draughtman's
and anatomist's sense of form, he had a strong sense of colour. To
good music, also, he was always susceptible; as a young man he used to
sing a little, but his voice, though true, was never strong. In music,
as in painting, he was untrained. Yet, as has been noted already, his
illustrations to MacGillivray's _Voyage of the Rattlesnake_ and his
holiday sketches suggest that he might have gone far had he been
trained as an artist.

When first married he used to set aside Saturday afternoons to take
his wife to the Ella concerts, fore-runners of the "Saturday Pops.,"
but it was not very long before the pressure of circumstance forbade
this pleasure. Later, he very occasionally managed to go to the
theatre; but his chief recreation, apart from change of work and the
rapid devouring of a good novel, was in meeting his friends, when
occasion offered, at the scientific societies or at dinner, or now
and then in country visits which had not yet received the name of
"week-ends."

When, in the middle seventies, his position was firmly established and
he was living in a roomy house, No. 4 Marlborough Place, St. John's
Wood, there were gatherings of friends on Sunday evenings. An informal
meal awaited the guests, who came either on a general invitation or
when specially bi