MEMOIR. Ixxxv 
of mind”* impressed him profoundly. Darwin, in his ever de- 
lightful candour, also tells us that the fiction which interested him 
was not of a high order. By contrast, Bates’s chief favourites were 
Thackeray and Thomas Hardy; he loved the one for the pathos 
and deep sympathy with our complex humanity which the shallow 
folk who call Thackeray cynical cannot see underlying the seemingly 
cold analysis of act and motive; he loved the other for the sweet 
country air that blows through the Woodlanders and Far from the 
Madding Crowd. He loathed the modern school of didactic, 
introspective, and sensational fiction. 
The love of Homer, which his brother tells us he learned to read 
in hours stolen from sleep before sweeping out the warehouse, never 
cooled ; Milton and his more immediate successors remained, as the 
favourite authors of his boyhood, favourites still; but when in 
recent years the volumes of Matthew Arnold’s poetry were lent 
him, he felt as did Keats on reading Chapman’s Homer—* a new 
planet swam into his ken.” Its classical note; its lucidity; its 
severity of restraint, as of Pegasus curbed; its saneness and sure- 
footedness; its gospel of cheerful acceptance of the inevitable, 
sung in stately verse in “Empedocles on Etna,” led him to give 
Arnold’s poetry the chief place in his assessment of the Victorian 
singers. Especially did the sonnet headed “Quiet Work ” express 
the ideal after which he strove :— 
“¢ Of toil unsever’d from tranquillity ; 
Of labour, that in lasting fruit outgrows 
Far noisier schemes, accomplished in repose, 
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.”’ 
It is often said that a man’s religious belief concerns only 
himself. So far as the light value of the majority of people’s 
opinions on so high a matter goes, this is true; but the case is 
altered when applied to men whose words carry weight, or whose 
discoveries compel us to ask what is their bearing on those problems 
of human relations and destinies of which the past offered a solution 
that no longer satisfies the present, because it is not compatible 
with facts since brought to light. 
Now there can be no doubt that the conclusions drawn from 
the facts which science has gathered as to the origin and succession 
and, withal, continuity of life-forms, are destructive of the current 
theories of man as differing absolutely in kind from the animals 
* Letter to Sir J. D. Hooker, Life and Letters, ii., 380, 
