Personal Characteristics 281 



Another aspect of the same trait of character, he 

 shewed in an address to medical students at a distribu- 

 tion of prizes. After congratulating the victors he 

 confessed to "an undercurrent of S3'mpathy for those 

 who have not been successful, for those valiant knights 

 who have been overthrown in their tourney, and have 

 not made their appearance in public." After recount- 

 ing an early failure of his own, he proceeded : 



" I said to myself, ' Never rniud ; what 's the next thing to he 

 done? ' Aud I fouud that pohcy of ' uever minding ' and go- 

 ing on to the next thing to be done, to be the most important 

 of all policies in the conduct of practical life. It does not mat- 

 ter how many tumbles you have in this life, so long as you do 

 not get dirty when you tumble ; it is only the people who have 

 to stop to be washed and made clean, who must necessarily 

 lose the race. You learn that which is of inestimable import- 

 ance — that there are a great many people in the world who are 

 just as clever as you are. You learn to put your trust, by and 

 by, in an economy and frugality of the exercise of your powers 

 both moral and intellectual ; and you very soon find out, if you 

 have not found it out before, that patience and tenacity of pur- 

 pose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness." 



All Huxley's work was marked by a quality which 

 may be called conscientiousness or thoroughness. Look- 

 ing through his memoirs, written mail)- years ago, the 

 subjects of which have since been handled and re- 

 handled by other writers with new knowledge and 

 with new methods at their disposal, one is struck that 

 all the observations he made have stood their groimd. 

 With new facts new generalisations have often been 

 reached, and some of the positions occupied by Httxley 

 have been turned. But what he saw and described 

 had not to be redescribed ; the citations he made from 

 the older authorities were always so chosen as to 



