Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

4 Marlborough Place, October 20, 1886.

My dear Hooker,

I wish you would not mind the trouble of looking through the enclosed chapter which I have written at F. Darwin’s request, and tell me what you think of it.  F.D. thinks I am hard upon the “Quarterly Article,” but I read it a fresh and it is absolutely scandalous.  The anonymous vilifiers of the present day will be none the worse for being reminded that they may yet hang in chains...

It occurs to me that it might be well to add a paragraph or two about the two chief objections made formerly and now to Darwin, the one, that it is introducing “chance” as a factor in nature, and the other that it is atheistic.

Both assertions are utter bosh.  None but parsons believe in “chance”; and the philosophical difficulties of Theism now are neither greater nor less than they have been ever since theism was invented.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The following letter to Mr. Edmund Gosse, who, just before, had been roughly handled in the “Quarterly Review,” doubtless owed some of its vigour to these newly revived memories of the “Quarterly” attack on Darwin.  But while the interest of the letter lies in a general question of literary ethics, the proper methods and limits of anonymous criticism, it must be noted that in this particular case its edge was turned by the fact that immediately afterwards, the critic proceeded to support his criticisms elsewhere uder his own name:—­]

October 22, 1886.

Dear Sir,

I beg leave to offer you my best thanks for your letter to the “Athenaeum,” which I have just read, and to congratulate you on the force and completeness of your answer to your assailant.

It is rarely worth while to notice criticism, but when a good chance of exposing one of these anonymous libellers who disgrace literature occurs, it is a public duty to avail oneself of it.

Oddly enough, I have recently been performing a similar “haute oeuvre.”  The most violent, base, and ignorant of all the attacks on Darwin at the time of the publication of the “Origin of Species” appeared in the “Quarterly Review” of that time; and I have built the reviewer a gibbet as high as Haman’s.

All good men and true should combine to stop this system of literary moonlighting.

I am yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[On the same date appeared his letter to the “Pall Mall Gazette,” which was occasioned by the perversion of the new Chair of English Literature at Oxford to “Middle English” philology:—­]

I fully agree with you that the relation of our Universities to the study of English literature is a matter of great public importance; and I have more than once taken occasion to express my conviction—­Firstly, that the works of our great English writers are pre-eminently worthy of being systematically studied in our schools and universities as literature; and secondly, that the establishment of professional chairs of philology, under the name of literature, may be a profit to science, but is really a fraud practised upon letters.