CHAKLES DARWIN. 109 



these : " 1 felt glad that I was alone : it was like 

 watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full orchestra a 

 chprus of the ' Messiah.' " Really, one feels penitent when 

 one quotes all this ! It was, surely to some purpose that 

 the young Darwin, even if imitatively, gave his attention 

 at college to music and painting nay, surely it was to a 

 very absolute purpose that the schoolboy read, in that 

 old window in the thick walls of the schoolroom, all that 

 best poetry of ours, from Shakespeare and Milton, and 

 Thomson, Gray, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, 

 Shelley. Darwin's diction, as we see, when need comes, 

 is emphatically a literary one let us think as we may, 

 let Darwin himself think as he may, his reading must 

 have sunk deep into him and, in effect, lived there. 



Mr. Darwin calls himself to Mr. Galton a " Liberal or 

 Radical," and we have seen that with Captain Fitz-Roy 

 he bore himself as a somewhat bigoted Whig. His son, 

 again, expresses himself of his father's opinion on polit- 

 ical matters, as though it was " formed rather by the 

 way than with any serious amount of thought." On the 

 part of Mr. Francis Darwin there is power in the reflec- 

 tion ; and it is doubtless true, as much else also is that 

 concerns his father's later weakened interest in every 

 consideration whatever but that of the Origin of Species. 

 Still there was a time when Charles Darwin could polit- 

 ically think. It is thus that his fresh young mind, at 

 its earliest, feels and deliberates in regard to the first 

 savages of whom he has experience. P. 229: "The 

 perfect equality among the individuals composing the 

 Fuegian tribes must for a long time retard their civilisa- 

 tion. As we see those animals whose instinct compels 

 them to live in society and obey a chief are most capable 

 of improvement, so is it with the races of mankind. 

 Whether we look at it as a cause or a consequence, the 

 more civilised always have the most artificial govern- 



