

STYLE. 155 



at obscurities, involved sentences, and other defects, and 

 thus took his revenge for all the criticism he had himself 

 to bear with. He used to quote with astonishment Miss 

 Martineau's advice to young authors, to write straight off 

 and send the MS. to the printer without correction. But in 

 some cases he acted in a somewhat similar manner. When 

 a sentence got hopelessly involved, he would ask himself, 

 "now what do you want to say?" and his answer written 

 down, would often disentangle the confusion. 



His style has been much praised ; on the other hand, at 

 least one good judge has remarked to me that it is not a good 

 style. It is, above all things, direct and clear ; and it is cha- 

 racteristic of himself in its simplicity, bordering on nai'vete, 

 and in its absence of pretence. He had the strongest disbelief 

 in the common idea that a classical scholar must write good 

 English ; indeed, he thought that the contrary was the case. 

 In writing, he sometimes showed the same tendency to strong 

 expressions as he did in conversation. Thus in the ' Origin,' 

 p. 440, there is a description of a larval cirripede, " with 

 six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of 

 magnificent compound eyes, and extremely complex antennae." 

 We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we com- 

 pared to an advertisement. This tendency to give himself 

 up to the enthusiastic turn of his thought, without fear of 

 being ludicrous, appears elsewhere in his writings. 



His courteous and conciliatory tone towards his reader is 

 remarkable, and it must be partly this quality which revealed 

 his personal sweetness of character to so many who had 

 never seen him. I have always felt it to be a curious fact, 

 that he who has altered the face of Biological Science, 

 and is in this respect the chief of the moderns, should 

 have written and worked in so essentially a non-modern 

 spirit and manner. In reading his books one is reminded 

 of the older naturalists rather than of the modern school 

 of writers. He was a Naturalist in the old sense of 



