PROFESSOR TYNDALL. 641 



mathematics), unless the links could be experimentally or observa- 

 tionally tested at no long intervals, was simply another manifesta- 

 tion of the same fundamental quality. I was not overburdened 

 with love for such dialectic festoon-work myself, but I owe not a 

 little to my friend for helping to abolish as much as remained. 



Once again, this quality of active veracity, the striving after 

 knowledge as apart from hearsay, lay at the root of TyndalPs 

 very remarkable powers of exposition, and of his wealth of ex- 

 perimental illustration. Hence, I take it, arose the guarded preci- 

 sion of the substance of a lecture or essay, which was often poetic- 

 ally rich, sometimes even exuberant, in form. In Sir Humphry 

 Davy and Mr. Faraday the Royal Institution had possessed two 

 unsurpassed models of the profound, yet popular, expositor of 

 science. Davy was before my time, but I have often had the 

 delight of listening to Faraday. An ineradicable tendency to think 

 of something else makes me an excellent test-object for oratory ; 

 and he was one of the few orators whom I have heard to whom I 

 could not choose but listen. It was no mean ordeal, therefore, to 

 which Tyndall was subjected when he was asked to give a " Fri- 

 day evening" in 1852; but he captured his hearers so completely 

 that his appointment to the Fullerian Professoriate of Physics, 

 with the use of a laboratory such as he needed for the original 

 work he loved, soon followed. And for more than thirty years he 

 held his own. From first to last, the announcement of a Friday 

 evening by him meant a crammed theater. 



Sheridan's reply to the lady who told him that his writings 

 were such charmingly easy reading " Easy reading, madam, is 

 damned hard writing " has never got into the general mind ; and 

 very few of the thousands of delighted listeners, I imagine, ever 

 had an inkling of what these facile discourses cost the lecturer. 

 I used to suffer rather badly from " lecture fever " myself ; but 

 I never met with anyone to whom an impending discourse was the 

 occasion of so much mental and physical disturbance as it was to 

 Tyndall. He was quite incapable of persuading himself, or of be- 

 ing persuaded by others, that, after all, a relative failure, now and 

 then, was of no great consequence ; indeed, from the point of view 

 of pure art, might be desirable. Whatever he gave, it must be the 

 best he had, whether it were a lecture or a dinner. Now that sort 

 of housekeeping costs. But some think with Shakespeare : 



" The painful warrior, famoused for fight, 

 After a thousand victories, once foiled, 

 Is from the book of honor razed quite , 



And all the rest forgot for which he toiled." 



And Tyndall was not minded to be forgot ; at any rate, for that 

 reason. 



VOL. XLIV. 49 



