446 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. 



centring round the host himself, whose end of the table 

 never flagged for conversation, grave or gay. 



Afterwards talk would go on in the drawing-room, or, 

 on warm summer evenings, in the garden nothing very 

 extensive, but boasting a lawn with an old apple-tree at the 

 further end, and in the borders such flowers and trees as 

 endure London air. Later on, there was almost sure to be 

 some music, to which my father himself was devoted. His 

 daughters sang; a musical friend would be there; Mr. 

 Herbert Spencer, a frequent visitor, was an authority on 

 music. Once only do I recollect any other form of enter- 

 tainment, and that was an occasion when Sir Henry Irving, 

 then not long established at the Lyceum, was present and 

 recited " Eugene Aram ' with great effect. 



In his London Letters Mr. G. W. Smalley * has recorded 

 his impressions of these evenings, at which he was often 

 present : 



There used to be Sunday evening dinners and parties in 

 Marlborough Place, to which people from many other worlds 

 than those of abstract science were bidden ; where talk was to 

 be heard of a kind rare in any world. It was scientific at times, 

 but subdued to the necessities of the occasion ; speculative, yet 

 kept within such bounds that bishop or archbishop might have 

 listened without offence ; political even, and still not common- 

 place; literary without pretence, and when artistic, free from 

 affectation. 



There and elsewhere Mr. Huxley easily took the lead if he 

 cared to, or if challenged. Nobody was more ready in a greater 

 variety of topics, and if they were scientific it was almost always 

 another who introduced them. Unlike some of his comrades of 

 the Royal Society, he was of opinion that man does not live by 

 science alone, and nothing came amiss to him. All his life long 

 he has been in the front of the battle that has raged between sci- 

 ence and not religion, but theology in its more dogmatic form. 

 Even in private the alarm of war is sometimes heard, and Mr. 

 Huxley is not a whit less formidable as a disputant across the 

 table than with pen in hand. Yet an angry man must be very 

 angry indeed before he could be angry with this adversary. He 



* Another interesting account from the same pen is to be found in 

 the article " Mr. Huxley," Scribners Magazine, October 1895. 



