CHARLES DARWIN. 79 



of his faith certainty remained, honestly enough, for a 

 few years now, at the conventional height. He did not 

 shrink, doubtless, from any university shibboleth. To 

 W. D. Fox, on the occasion of the death of a relative, he 

 writes in his letter of condolence, 23rd April 1829, that 

 he is assured it will be known where support is to be 

 looked for ; " and after so pure and holy a comfort as the 

 Bible affords, he is equally assured how useless the 

 sympathy of all friends must appear." And, whilst on 

 board the Beagle, he tells us himself : " I was quite 

 orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by 

 several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for 

 quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority" (i. 307). 

 Let me point, in passing, to that parenthesis as signally 

 Darwinian : it is not for him, by any inadvertence, to 

 leave a possible slur gratuitously on any man ! But, in the 

 end (at least as late as 1873), we find it formally said 

 (iii. 179): "I gave up common religious belief almost 

 independently from my own reflections." Nor, looking 

 to the world as it is, do I apprehend that there need 

 be any special outcry so far. It is highly probable that 

 with a very very great many nowadays convention is 

 the rule, and a man ranks religiously rather by the side 

 he takes, than by any overt profession of dogmas which 

 formulate faith. 



" During the three years which I spent at Cambridge," 

 Mr. Darwin declares, " my time was wasted, as far as the 

 academical studies were concerned, as completely as at 

 Edinburgh or at school." When we look closely at this, 

 we see that what is meant as unsatisfactory concerns 

 alone instruction through books. These apart, there has 

 been quite a busy intellectual life, whether at school or 

 in Edinburgh. And yet we hear of books, too, Shake- 

 speare, Thomson, Byron, Scott, and the reading of them ! 



" My musical friends," says Mr. Darwin, " sometimes 



