i840 INFLUENCE OF CARLYLE p 



the time when such merry and joyous parties of aunts and 

 cousins used to assemble there. I assure you we have often 

 talked of "Tom Huxley" (who was sometimes one of the 

 party) looking so thin and ill, and pretending to make hay with 

 one hand, while in the other he held a German book ! Do you 

 remember it ? And the picnic at Scar Bank ? And how often too 

 your patience was put to the test in looking for your German 

 books which had been hidden by some of those playful compan- 

 ions who were rather less inclined for learning than yourself? 



It is interesting to see from this letter and from a journal, 

 to be quoted hereafter, that he had thus early begun to 

 teach himself German, an undertaking more momentous in 

 its consequences than the boy dreamed of. The knowledge 

 of German thus early acquired was soon of the utmost serv- 

 ice in making him acquainted with the advance of biological 

 investigation on the continent at a time when few indeed 

 among English men of science were able to follow it at first 

 hand, and turn the light of the newest theories upon their 

 own researches. 



It is therefore peculiarly interesting to note the cause 

 which determined the young Huxley to take up the study of 

 so little read a language. I have more than once heard him 

 say that this was one half of the debt he owed to Carlyle, 

 the other half being an intense hatred of shams of every sort 

 and kind. The translations from the German, the constant 

 references to German literature and philosophy, fired him to 

 try the vast original from which these specimens were quar- 

 ried, for the sake partly of the literature, but still more of 

 the philosophy. The translation of Wilhelm Mcister, and 

 some of the Miscellaneous Essays together, with The French 

 Revolution, were certainly among works of Carlyle with 

 which he first made acquaintance, to be followed later by 

 Sartor Resartus, which for many years afterwards was his 

 Enchiridion, as he puts it in an unpublished autobiographi- 

 cal fragment. 



By great good fortune, a singularly interesting glimpse 

 of my father's. life from the age of fifteen onwards has been 

 preserved in the shape of a fragmentary journal which he 

 entitled, German fashion, Thoughts and Doings. Begun 



