68 DAKWINIANIS.M. 



long and last, he gave his consent ! Then how proud he 

 was of the letters that came from Charles ! " There is a 

 natural good-humoured energy in them, just like himself," 

 he brags. How to hear that Captain Fitz-Koy should, 

 with his own hands, have arranged the hammock of his 

 son when sick and suffering at sea, brought tears into 

 his eyes ! What a happy man he was when Charles 

 came back and broke in upon them at breakfast how 

 he must needs cry out to his daughters as he looked at 

 him, " Why, the shape of his head is quite altered ! " 



He was a good old man ; and, no doubt, his " example " 

 not only " ought to have been," as Charles modestly puts 

 it, but actually was, " of much moral service to his chil- 

 dren." In fact, different as they were, it was really only 

 in order that such a father should have such a son. For 

 the son was a thorough Englishman ; and what but a 

 thorough Englishman, with his knee-breeches and drab- 

 gaiters, with his biassed good nature and his outspoken 

 choleric ways, was that burly old country doctor, shrewd, 

 careful, wilful, proud of his well-to-do connections, proud 

 of being himself well-to-do, and proud of enabling his 

 children to show it! "The vessel will be out three 

 years," Charles writes " I do not object, so that my 

 father docs not ! " 



Erasmus, the brother of Charles, otherwise than in his 

 approbation of the great epochal book of the latter, does 

 not concern us here. He was evidently an intelligent 

 and well-read man, most worthy, most thoroughly well- 

 disposed, but peculiar. " My dear one," writes Carlyle, 

 " had a great favour for this honest Darwin always ; 

 many a road, to shops and the like, he drove her in his 

 cab (' Darwingium Cabbum,' comparable to Georgium 

 Sidus), in those early days when even the charge of 

 omnibuses was a consideration, and his sparse utterances, 

 sardonic often, were a great amusement to her. 'A 



