THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



And when I consider, in one view, the many things . . . which 

 I have upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being employed in 

 this manner at my time of life. But, in another view, and taking in 

 all circumstances, these things, as trifling as they may appear, no less 

 than things of greater importance, seem to be put upon me to do. 

 Bishop Butler to the Duchess of Somerset. 



THE " many things " to which the Duchess's corre- 

 spondent here refers are the repairs and improvements 

 of the episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if the great 

 apologist, greater in nothing than in the simple dignity 

 of his character, would have considered the writing an 

 account of himself as a thing which could be put upon 

 him to do whatever circumstances might be taken in. 

 But the good bishop lived in an age when a man 

 might write books and yet be permitted to keep his 

 private existence to himself; in the pre-Boswellian 

 epoch, when the germ of the photographer lay concealed 

 in the distant future, and the interviewer who pervades 

 our age was an unforeseen, indeed unimaginable, birth 

 of time. 



At present, the most convinced believer in the aphor- 

 ism " Bene qui latuit, bene vixit," is not always able to 

 act up to it. An importunate person informs him that 

 his portrait is about to be published and will be ac- 

 companied by a biography which the importunate 

 person proposes to write. The sufferer knows what that 



