SIR GEORGE DARWIN 187 



one could feel it in the quality of everything 

 he said about himself. Everything in the 

 world was interesting and wonderful to him, 

 and he had the power of making other people 

 feel it. 



He had a passion for going everywhere and 

 seeing everj'thing ; learning every language, 

 knowing the technicalities of every trade ; and 

 all this emphatically not from the scientific 

 or collector's point of view, but from a deep 

 sense of the romance and interest of every- 

 thing. It was splendid to travel with him ; 

 he always learned as much as possible of the 

 language, and talked to everyone ; we had to 

 see simply everything there was to be seen, 

 and it was all interesting, like an adventure. 

 For instance, at Vienna I remember being 

 taken to a most improper music hall, and at 

 Schonbrunn hearing from an old forester the 

 whole secret history of the old Emperor's son. 

 My father would tell us the stories of the 

 places we went to with an incomparable 

 conviction and sense of the reality and 

 dramaticness of the events. It is absurd, of 

 course, but in that respect he always seemed to 

 me a Httle like Sir Walter Scott. ^ 



The books he used to read to us when we 

 were quite small, and which we adored, were 

 Percy's Reliqiies and the Prologue to the 



'*■ Compare Mr. Chesterton's Twelve Types, (1903), p. 190. He 

 speaks of Scott's critic in the Edinburgh Review : " The only thing 

 to be said about that critic is that he had never been a little boy. 

 He foolishly imagined that Scott valued the plume and dagger of 

 Marmion for Marmion's sake. Not being himself romantic, he 

 could not understand that Scott valued the plume because it was a 

 plume, and the dagger because it was a dagger." 



