4 DARWINIANISM. 



the public, conclusion there could be none but that Dr. 

 Erasmus Darwin, convicted in his verse of the confused 

 images and vacant resonance of mere repercussion and 

 rebound, as previously, in his prose, only of " the crude 

 and visionary metaphysics of the half-informed multitude 

 who " it is Dugald Stewart speaks " follow the medical 

 trade," had, after having excited "a degree of interest in 

 the literary world, wholly disproportionate to his merits " 

 (Dr. Welsh in Memoir of Brown), been definitively 

 remitted and consigned to his primitive obscurity and 

 prescriptive oblivion. 



In the later Darwinian literature it is not difficult to 

 detect tokens of a hurt sense of this on the part of the 

 family. It is not to be supposed, indeed, that any right- 

 feeling scions of the stem could have remained in 

 equanimity under the idea that he, who had been their 

 envied honour as a gem, should be the source of but half 

 a smile for the future as no more than proved and 

 convicted paste. Charles, for his part, even in the 

 midst of his own great reputation, cannot but think 

 again and again of his grandfather, in regard to whom he 

 says once : " Throughout his letters 1 have been struck 

 with his indifference to fame and the complete absence 

 of all signs of any over-estimation of his own abilities, 

 or of the success of his works." When we think, 

 however, of the rough sufficiency and rude imperiousness 

 of the man, of which his coarse reception of Dr. Thomas 

 Brown may furnish some proof, one feels more disposed 

 to respect in Mr. Darwin his family piety than his know- 

 ledge of character. His own son (Charles's), indeed, would 

 seem to have experienced the same suggestion here, for 

 his comment the comment of Mr. Francis Darwin 

 appended to the above words, is, " Yet we get no 

 evidence in Erasmus of the intense modesty and 

 simplicity that marked Charles Darwin's whole nature." 



