DR. ERASMUS DARWIN. 43 



own dwelling-house, which he had so admirably laid out, 

 would it be too much on one side to say that it was 

 his taste for mechanism that still found itself in his 

 mechanical verse ? Of anything like a true poetical 

 taste Erasmus, really, does not seem to have possessed 

 a vestige. He preferred " Akenside's blank verse to 

 Milton's," as " of higher polish, of more classic purity, 

 and more dignified construction." He " could not read 

 Cowper's Task through," and " he particularly disliked 

 Milton's sonnets ! " 



To enter here into any detailed exposition of the 

 works of Dr. Erasmus Darwin would be out of place. 

 But it will be well, perhaps, to signalise a few of those 

 tenets in which he may be said, if not always to have pre- 

 ceded or anticipated, at least to have resembled, Charles. 



We have already heard about Dr. Ernst Krause's 

 Essay on the Scientific Works of Erasmus Darwin. We 

 have heard that it is " a glorifying of the elder Darwin." 

 How eagerly Charles and his brother took to it, the 

 former adding to the translation of it into English, 

 which he had begged to be allowed to make, and which 

 he had committed to Mr. Dallas, a supplement on the 

 life of Erasmus larger than the Essay itself, all this we 

 have already heard as well. Now the point here is this. 

 This Krause little book comes to us so absolutely, in 

 every way, with the evolutionist stamp upon it, that, 

 beyond all possibility of either question or cavil, its 

 authority in every relation to the views concerned, must 

 be regarded by us as equally absolute. When Dr. Krause 

 declares, therefore, that Charles Darwin " has succeeded 

 to an intellectual inheritance, and carried out a programme 

 sketched forth and left behind by his grandfather ; " that 

 " almost every single work of the younger Darwin may 

 be paralleled by at least a chapter in the works of his 

 ancestor ; " that " heredity, adaptation, the protective 



