384 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 



History had revealed to him the unspeakable horrors 

 of a black insurrection. Hence his action, as regards 

 Governor Eyre, after the outbreak at Morant Bay.* 

 " Hell had broken loose, and the fire must be quenched 

 at any cost." Perhaps he was right; perhaps he was 

 wrong. The question at the time produced an extra- 

 ordinary cleavage among intimate friends; but not, to 

 my knowledge, did it produce any permanent estrange- 

 ment. Huxley and Spencer fought like brothers under 

 a common flag; Hooker and myself, equally fraternal, 

 under the opposite one. We surely did not love each 

 other less afterwards because of this temporary diver- 

 gence of judgment. I fervently trust that all our dif- 

 ferences may have a similar end. 



" It is related," says Dr. Garnet, " that, fascinated 

 by the grand figure of Michael Angelo, he [Carlyle] 

 once announced his intention of writing his life." He 

 would have thus added to his picture-gallery " The Hero 

 as Artist." Carlyle would have found " The Hero as 

 Man of Science " a more fitting theme. He had mas- 

 tered the " Principia," and was well aware of the vast 

 revolutionary change wrought, not in Science only, but 

 in the whole world of thought, by the theory of gravita- 

 tion. The apparently innocent statement, that every 

 particle of matter attracted every other particle with a 

 force which was a function of the distance between them, 

 carried the mind away from the merely falling atoms 

 of Epicurus and Lucretius to conceptions of molecular 

 forces. By their aid we look intellectually into the 



* I may here say that when speaking to Governor Eyre upon 

 the subject, he declared to me that he knew as little, at the time, 

 about the floggings of women and other cruelties, as I did. But 

 though he might have mitigated the severity of the verdict against 

 himself by shifting the odium on to his subordinates, he refused 

 to do so, and accepted all the blame. 



