ch. iv.] REMINISCENCES. 105 



through thus working for him in a way I never should 

 otherwise have done." 



Perhaps the commonest corrections needed were of obscu- 

 rities due to the omission of a necessary link in the reason- 

 ing, evidently omitted through familiarity with the subject. 

 Not that there was any fault in the sequence of the thoughts, 

 but that from familiarity with his argument he did not no- 

 tice when the words failed to reproduce his thought. He 

 also frequently put too much matter into one sentence, so 

 that it had to be cut up into two. 



On the whole, I think the pains which my father took 

 over the literary part of the work was very remarkable. 

 He often laughed or grumbled at himself for the difficulty 

 which he found in writing English, saying, for instance, 

 that if a bad arrangement of a sentence was possible, he 

 should be sore to adopt it. He once got much amusement 

 and satisfaction out of the difficulty which one of the family 

 found in writing a short circular. He had the pleasure of 

 correcting and laughing at obscurities, involved sentences, 

 and other defects, and thus took his revenge for all the 

 criticism he had himself to bear with. He would quote with 

 astonishment Miss Marti neau's advice to young authors, to 

 write straight off and send the MS. to the printer without cor- 

 rection. But in some cases he acted in a somewhat similar 

 manner. When a sentence became hopelessly involved, he 

 would ask himself, " now what do you want to say ? " and his 

 answer written down, would often disentangle the confusion. 



His style has been much praised ; on the other hand, at 

 least one good judge has remarked to me that it is not a 

 good style. It is, above all things, direct and clear ; and 

 it is characteristic of himself in its simplicity bordering 

 on naivete, and in its absence of pretence. He had the 

 strongest disbelief in the common idea that a classical 

 scholar must write good English ; indeed, he thought that 

 the contrary was the case. In writing, he sometimes showed 

 the same tendency to strong expressions that he did in con- 

 versation. Thus in the Origin, p. 440, there is a descrip- 

 tion of a larval cirripede, " with six pairs of beautifully con- 

 structed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes, 

 and extremely complex antennae." We used to laugh at 

 him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertise- 

 ment. This tendency to give himself up to the enthusias- 

 tic turn of his thought, without fear of being ludicrous ap- 

 pears elsewhere in his writings. 



