52 THE COMING [CH. 



LyelFs father had to a great extent guided his son's 

 classical studies, and afc Oxford, where Lyell took 

 a good degree in classics, he practised diligently both 

 prose and poetic composition. Lyell once told me 

 that his tutor Dalby (afterwards a Dean) had put 

 Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 

 into his hand with certain passages marked as 'not 

 to be read.' When he had studied the whole work 

 (of course including the marked passages) he said 

 he conceived a profound admiration for the author's 

 literary skill and this feeling he retained throughout 

 his after life. It is not improbable, indeed, that 

 Lyell learned from Gibbon that a ' frontal attack' 

 on a fortress of error is much less likely to succeed 

 than one of ' sap and mine.' Lyell was always most 

 careful in the composition of his works, sparing no 

 pains to make his meaning clear, while he aimed at 

 elegance of expression and logical sequence in the 

 presentation of his ideas. The weakness of his eyes 

 was a great difficulty to him, throughout his life, 

 and, when not employing an amanuensis, he generally 

 wrote stretched out on the floor or on a sofa, with his 

 eyes close to the paper. 



The relation of Lyell's views to those of Hutton, 

 may best be described in the words of his contem- 

 porary, Whewell, whose remarks written immediately 

 after the publication of the first volume of the 

 Principles, lose nothing in effectiveness from the 



