522 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xxxiii 



mony to the influence of Huxley's writings even on his elder 

 contemporaries. 



From Tames Spedding 



■' Feb. I, 1878. 



. . . When you admit that you study Bacon with a preju- 

 dice, you mean of course an unfavourable opinion previously 

 formed on sufficient gnounds. Now I am myself supposed to 

 have studied him with a prejudice the other way : but this I 

 cannot admit, in any sense of the word ; for when I first made 

 his acquaintance I had no opinion or feeling about him at all 

 — more than the ordinary expectation of a young man to find 

 what he is told to look for. My earliest impression of his 

 character came probably from Thompson — whose portrait of 

 him, except as touched and softened by the tenderer hand of 

 " the sweet-souled poet of the Seasons," did not differ from the 

 ordinary one. It was not long indeed before I did begin to 

 form an opinion of my own; one of those a//^r-judgments which 

 are liable to be mistaken for prejudices by those who judge 

 differently, and which, being formed, do, no doubt, tell upon the 

 balance. For it was not long before I found myself indebted 

 to him for the greatest benefit probably that any man, living or 

 dead, can confer on another. In my school and college days I 

 had been betrayed by an ambition to excel in themes and decla- 

 mations into the study, admiration, and imitation of the rheto- 

 ricians. In the course of my last long vacation — the autumn of 

 1830 — I was inspired with a new ambition, namely, to think 

 justly about everything which I thought about at all, and to act 

 accordingly ; a conviction for which I cannot cease to feel grate- 

 ful, and which I distinctly trace to the accident of having in 

 the beginning, of that same vacation given two shillings at 

 a second-hand bookstall for a little volume of Dove's classics, 

 containing the Advancement of Learning. And if I could tell 

 you how many superlatives I have since that time degraded 

 into the positive ; how many innumerables and infinites I have 

 replaced by counted numbers and estimated quantities; how 

 many assumptions, important to the argument in hand, I have 

 withdrawn because I found on more consideration that the fact 

 might be explained otherwise; and how many effective epithets 

 I have discarded when I found that I could not fully verify 

 them ; you would think it no less than just that I should claim 

 for myself and concede to others the right of being judged by 

 the last edition rather than the first. That a persistent en- 



