2 HUXLEY 



But his boyhood was a cheerless time. Reversing 

 Matthew Arnold's sunnier memories : — 



No " rigorous teachers seized his youth, 

 And purged its faith, and tried its fire, 



Shewed him the high, white star of truth, 

 There bade him gaze, and there aspire. " 



He told Charles Kingsley that he was " kicked into 

 the world a boy without guide or training, or with 

 worse than none," 1 and, contrasting Herbert Spen- 

 cer's happier lot, says that he " had two years of a 

 Pandemonium of a school (between eight and ten), 

 and after that neither help nor sympathy in any in- 

 tellectual direction till he reached manhood." 2 On 

 the dreary week-days he was flung among boys of 

 low type, and on the drearier Sundays he was taken 

 to church, where the preacher's allusions to infidels 

 left on his mind the impression that " such folks be- 

 longed to the criminal classes." When he was about 

 ten, the break-up of the Ealing school sent the 

 family, literally, to Coventry, where, in the irony of 

 fate, the shiftless father became manager of a 

 savings' bank. The daughters took to school-keep- 

 ing, and the boys were left free to browse among the 

 remnants of the home library. Huxley was pos- 

 sessed of that love of reading which, in Gibbon's 

 famous words, he " would not have exchanged for the 

 1 1. 220. 2 ii. I4 ^ 



