LIFE AND LETTERS OF FARAD A T. 307 
He returned in 1815 to the Royal Institution. Here he 
helped Davy for years; he worked also for himself, and 
lectured frequently at the City Philosophical Society. He 
took lessons in elocution, happily without damage to his 
natural force, earnestness, and grace of delivery. He was 
never pledged to theory, and he changed in opinion as 
knowledge advanced. With him life was growth. In 
those early lectures we hear him say, " In knowledge, that 
man only is to be contemned and despised who is not in a 
state of transition/' And again: "Nothing is more dif- 
ficult and requires more caution than philosophical deduc- 
tion, nor is there anything more ad verse to its accuracy than 
fixity of opinion." Not that he was wafted about by every 
wind of doctrine; but that he united flexibility with his 
strength. In striking contrast with this intellectual ex- 
pansiveness was his fixity in religion, but this is a subject 
which cannot be discussed here. 
Of all the letters published in these volumes none possess 
a greater charm than those of Faraday to his wife. Here, 
as Dr. Bence Jones truly remarks, " he laid open all his 
mind and the whole of his character, and what can be 
made known can scarcely fail to charm every one by its 
loveliness, its truthfulness, and its earnestness." Abbott 
and he 'sometimes swerved into word-play about love; 
but up to 1820, or thereabouts, the passion was potential 
merely. Faraday's journal indeed contains entries which 
show that he took pleasure in the assertion of his contempt 
for love; but these very entries became links in his destiny. 
It was through them that he became acquainted with one 
who inspired him with a feeling which only ended with his 
life. His biographer has given us the means of tracing 
the varying moods which preceded his acceptance. They 
reveal more than the common alternations of light and 
gloom; at one moment he wishes that his flesh might melt 
and that he might become nothing; at another he is 
intoxicated with hope. The impetuosity of his character 
was then unchastened by the discipline to which it was 
subjected in after years. The very strength of his passion 
proved for a time a bar to its advance, suggesting, as it 
did, to the conscientious mind of Miss Barnard, doubts of 
Dr. Bence Jones that I asked him to do so. The rumor of a banquet 
at Geneva illustrates the tendency to substitute for the youth of 1814 
the Faraday of later years. 
