468 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. XIX 



similar "haute ceuvre." The most violent, base, and 

 ignorant of all the attacks on Darwin at the time of the 

 publication of the " Origin of Species " appeared in the 

 Quarterly Review of that time ; and I have built the 

 reviewer a gibbet as high as Haman's. 



All good men and true should combine to stop this 

 system of literary moonlighting. I am yours very 

 faithfully, T. H. HUXLEY. 



On the same date appeared his letter to the Pall 

 Mall Gazette, which was occasioned by the perversion 

 of the new Chair of English Literature at Oxford to 

 " Middle English " philology : 



I fully agree with you that the relation of our 

 Universities to the study of English literature is a matter 

 of great public importance ; and I have more than once 

 taken occasion to express my conviction Firstly, that 

 the works of our great English writers are pre-eminently 

 worthy of being systematically studied in our schools and 

 universities as literature ; and secondly, that the estab- 

 lishment of professional chairs of philology, under the 

 name of literature, may be a profit to science, but is 

 really a fraud practised upon letters. 



That a young Englishman may be turned out of one 

 of our universities, " epopt and perfect," so far as their 

 system takes him, and yet ignorant of the noble litera- 

 ture which has grown up in those islands during the last 

 three centuries, no less than of the development of the 

 philosophical and political ideas which have most pro- 

 foundly influenced modern civilisation, is a fact in the 

 history of the nineteenth century which the twentieth 

 will find hard to believe ; though, perhaps, it is not 

 more incredible than our current superstition that 

 whoso wishes to write and speak English well should 

 mould his style after the models furnished by classical 

 antiquity. For my part, I venture to doubt the 



