134 Charles Darwin. 



After four o'clock he would take another walk, 

 then work from half-past four till half-past five. In 

 the evening he played backgammon with his wife, 

 then usually reading some scientific work until the 

 hour for retiring. He enjoyed good music though 

 his ear was not correct, and in this respect and in his 

 literary tastes he considered himself to be deficient, 

 judging from the popular standard. Darwin tells us 

 that he underwent a singular change in this connec- 

 tion as he advanced in years. We have seen that in 

 his youth he was enthusiastically fond of the poets, 

 Milton, Shakespeare, Shelley, Gray, and others, but 

 soon after attaining the age of thirty, his desire for 

 literature of this kind began to cease, until finally he 

 could not endure poetry, while the historical plays of 

 Shakespeare were found '' intolerably dull." His 

 taste for a certain class of music and art also failed, 

 while his pleasure in novels, where the imagination 

 was called into play, increased. Darwin considered 

 it a loss of the higher aesthetic tastes, and an atrophy 

 of that portion of the brain upon which they de- 

 pended, and the fact that he still enjoyed histories, 

 biographies, travels, and various abstruse works puz- 

 zled him not a little. In all probability, the five 

 years of active association in so varied a field had 

 blunted his sensibilities for the artificial unless it was 

 of a highly exciting or imaginative character. 



One might expect to find in a man whose daily 

 life was a constant fight against suffering, and who 

 worked with a regularity that was almost unparal- 

 leled, a break or flaw at times in the evenness of dis- 

 position, but Darwin's life was wonderful in its 



