208 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 
studying Russian, chiefly in order to acquire a thor- 
ough familiarity with the work of the great anatomist, 
Kovalevsky. How far he may have carried that study 
I know not; but his son tells us that it was also in mid- 
dle life that he began Greek, in order to read, at first 
hand, Aristotle and the New Testament. To read 
Aristotle with critical discernment requires an ex- 
tremely good knowledge of Greek; and if Huxley 
got so far as that, we need not be surprised at hear- 
ing that he could enjoy the Homeric poems in the 
original. 
I suppose there were few topics in the heavens or 
on earth that did not get overhauled at that little 
library fireside. At one time it would be politics, 
and my friend would thank God that, whatever mis- 
takes he might have made in life, he had never bowed 
the knee to either of those intolerable humbugs, 
Louis Napoleon or Benjamin Disraeli. Without 
admitting that the shifty Jew deserved to be placed 
on quite so low a plane as Hortense Beauharnais’s 
feeble son, we can easily see how distasteful he would 
be to a man of Huxley’s earnest and whole-souled 
directness. But antipathy to Disraeli did not in this 
case mean fondness for Gladstone. In later years, 
when Huxley was having his great controversy with 
Gladstone, we find him writing: “Seriously, it is to 
me a great thing that the destinies of this country 
should at present be seriously influenced by a man — 
who, whatever he may be in the affairs of which I am 
no judge, is nothing but a copious shuffler in those 
which I do understand.” In 1773 there occurred a 
brief passage at arms between Gladstone and Herbert 
Spencer, in which the great statesman’s intellect 
