Last Years. 387 



Little advantage, however, had come to Youmans 

 from his sojourn in Georgia. Its dreariness went far 

 to outweigh any good results that might have come 

 from the softness of climate, and it is probable that 

 his disease was too far advanced to be arrested by 

 change of scene. Soon after he had returned home 

 Youmans told me that he would far rather die in 

 New York than live in Georgia. There was no Cen- 

 tury Club in Thomasville, no thronged and bustling 

 Broadway, no familiar faces of old friends, no daily 

 round of cheerful duties. The balmy breezes from 

 the Gulf were all very well, and the first sight of the 

 negro " in his native jungle " was more or less enter- 

 taining ; but such things could not reconcile poor 

 Youmans to the pain of lifelong habits brought to a 

 halt. Keenly conscious of all that remained to be 

 done if long-cherished plans were ever to be carried 

 out, there came upon him with overwhelming force a 

 sense of waning powers and numbered days, and he 

 returned to New York rather worse than when he 

 left it. 



His attention for the next three months was more 

 or less occupied with the controversy that grew out 

 of the positivist Mr. Frederic Harrison's attack upon 

 the views set forth in Spencer's Religious Retro- 

 spect and Prospect. Mr. Harrison's article, in its 

 title, stigmatized Spencer's theory as The Ghost of 

 Religion. Mr. Spencer replied with a paper entitled 

 Retrogressive Religion, by which phrase he happily 

 characterized the dismal rubbish inflicted upon an 

 extremely small part of the world by the half-crazed 

 Comte as the "religion of humanity." Whenever 

 a positivist wishes to express withering scorn for 

 anything he does not like he selects as the most 



