STYLE. 



131 



of the thoughts, but that from familiarity with his argument 

 he did not notice 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 sure to I 

 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 laugh- 

 ing at obscurities, involved sentences, and other defects, and 

 thus took his revenge for all the criticism he had himself 

 to bear with. He used to quote with astonishment Miss 

 Martineau's advice to young authors, to write straight off 

 and send the MS. to the printer without correction. But in 

 some cases he acted in a somewhat similar manner. When 

 a sentence got 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 lia3 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 as he did in conversation. Thus in the ' Origin,' 

 p. 440, there is a description of a larval cirripede, '' with 

 six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of 

 magnificent compound eyes, and extremely complex antennae." 

 We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we com- 

 pared to an advertisement. This tendency to give himself 

 up to the enthusiastic turn of his thought, without fear of 

 being ludicrous, appears elsewhere in his writings. 



