350 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



will draw you a zebra." And among the five thousand 

 illustrations which he painted, I do not think that there is 

 one to be found in which an attempt is made to depict the 

 human form. Man was the animal he studied less than 

 any other, understood most imperfectly, and, on the 

 whole, was least interested in. At any moment he would 

 have cheerfully given a wilderness of strangers for a new 

 rotifer. 



His appreciation of the plastic arts, notwithstanding his 

 training and his skill, was very limited. He was positively 

 blind to sculpture and architecture, to the presence of 

 which his attention had to be forcibly drawn, if it was 

 to be drawn at all. After lecturing in some of the 

 cathedral cities of England, he has been found not to have 

 noticed that there was a minster in the place ; much less 

 could he describe such a church or appreciate it. He 

 occasionally visited the Royal Academy, and exhibited 

 considerable interest, but invariably in the direction of 

 detecting errors or the reverse in the drawing or placing of 

 natural phenomena, such as plants, animals, or heavenly 

 bodies. Of the drama he disapproved with a vehemence 

 which would have done credit to Jeremy Collier or 

 William Law, and he would have swept it out of existence 

 had he possessed the power to do so. With all his passion 

 for poetry, he would never consent to read Shakespeare. 

 He was inside a theatre but once; in 1853, on the first 

 night of the revival of Byron's Sardanapalus at Drury 

 Lane, he was present in the pit. Faraday — as little of a 

 playgoer as himself, I suppose — was a spectator on the same 

 occasion. To my father, the attraction was the careful 

 antiquarian reproduction of an Assyrian court, founded 

 upon the then recent discoveries made at Nineveh by 

 Botta and Layard. In after years I asked him what effect 

 this solitary visit to a theatre had produced upon him. He 



