VICTORY AND REST 175 



reader, on the very face of every word lie ever printed. 

 Like his works themselves, they must long outlive him. 

 But his sympathetic kindliness, his ready generosity, the 

 staunchness of his friendship, the width and depth and 

 breadth of his affections, the manner in which ' he bore 

 with those who blamed him unjustly without blaming 

 them in return,' these things can never so well be known 

 to any other generation of men as to the three genera- 

 tions who walked the world with him. Many even of 

 those who did not know him loved him like a father ; to 

 many who never saw his face, the hope of winning 

 Charles Darwin's approbation and regard was the high- 

 est incentive to thought and action. Towards younger 

 men. especially, his unremitting kindness was always 

 most noteworthy : he spoke and wrote to them, not 

 like one of the masters in Israel, but like a fellow- 

 worker and seeker after truth, interested in their 

 interests, pleased at their successes, sympathetic with 

 their failures, gentle to their mistakes. Not that he ever 

 spared rightful criticism ; on the contrary, the love of 

 truth was with him so overpowering and enthralling 

 a motive that he pointed out what seemed to him errors 

 or misconceptions in the work of others with perfect 

 frankness, fully expecting them to be as pleased and 

 delighted at a suggested amendment of their faulty 

 writing as he himself was in his own case. But his 

 praise was as generous as his criticism was frank ; and, 

 amid all the toil of his laborious life in his study at 

 Down, he could always find time to read and comment 

 at full length upon whatever fresh contributions to his 

 own subjects the merest tyro might venture to submit 

 for his consideration. He had the sympathetic recep- 



