SELECTIONS FROM 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 circum- 

 stances, these things, as trifling as they appear, no less than things of 

 greater importance, seem to be put upon me to do." 5 



BISHOP BUTLER TO THE DUCHESS OF SOMERSET 



THE "many things" to which the Duchess's correspondent 

 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 10 

 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, 15 

 when the germ of the photographer lay concealed in the dis- 

 tant future, and the interviewer who pervades our age was 

 an unforeseen, indeed unimaginable, birth of time. 



At present, the most convinced believer in the aphorism 

 "Bene qui latuit, bene vixit," is not always able to act up to 20 

 it. An importunate person informs him that his portrait 

 is about to be published and will be accompanied by a biog- 

 raphy which the importunate person proposes to write. The 

 sufferer knows what that means; either he undertakes to 

 revise the "biography" or he does not. In the former case, 25 



