i85i EARLY FRIENDS 71 



I have drawn the sword, but whether I am in truth to beat 

 the giants and deliver my princess from the enchanted castle is 

 yet to be 'seen. 



For several months he lived with his brother George and 

 his wife at North Bank, St. John's Wood (the house was 

 pulled down in 1896 for the Great Central Railway), but the 

 surroundings were too easy, and not conducive to hard 

 work. 



I must, I fear, emigrate to some " two pair back," which 

 shall have the feel and manner of a workshop, where I can leave 

 my books about and dissect a marine nastiness if I think fit, 

 sallying forth to meet the world when necessary, and giving it 

 no more time than necessary. If it were not for a fear that P. 

 would take it unkindly I should go at once. I must summon up 

 moral courage somehow (how difficult when it is to pain those| 

 we love ! ) and trust to her good sense for the rest. 



And later : — 



... I have been very busy looking about for the last two 

 days, and have been in fifty houses if I have been in one. 1 

 want some place with a decent address, cheap, and beyond all 

 things, clean. The dirty holes that some of these lodgings are ! 

 such tawdry finery and such servants, with their faces and hands 

 not merely dirty, but absolutely macadamised. And they all 

 make this confounded great Exhibition a plea for about doubling 

 the rent. 



So in April 1851 he removed to lodgings hard by, at i 

 Hanover Place, Clarence Gate, Regent's Park (" which 

 sounds grand, but means nothing more than a sitting-room 

 and bedroom in a small house "), then to St. Anne's Gar- 

 dens, and after that to Upper York Place, while making 

 a second home with his brother. His other great friends 

 already in London were the Fannings, who had left Aus- 

 tralia a few months before his own return. In the scientific 

 world he spon made acquaintance with most of the leading 

 men, and began a close friendship with Edward Forbes, with 

 George Busk (then surgeon to H.M.S. Dreadnought at 

 Greenwich, afterwards President of the College of Sur- 

 geons) and his accomplished wife, and later in the year 

 with both Hooker and Tyndall. The Busks, indeed, showed 



