afforded a better safeguard against attacks, instinct with
malignity and spiced with shameless impertinences.

Yet such was the portion of one of the kindest and truest men
that it was ever my good fortune to know; and years had to pass
away before misrepresentation, ridicule, and denunciation, ceased
to be the most notable constituents of the majority of the
multitudinous criticisms of his work which poured from the press.
I am loth to rake any of these ancient scandals from their well-
deserved oblivion; but I must make good a statement which may
seem overcharged to the present generation, and there is no piece
justificative more apt for the purpose, or more worthy of such
dishonour, than the article in the 'Quarterly Review' for July,
1860. (I was not aware when I wrote these passages that the
authorship of the article had been publicly acknowledged.
Confession unaccompanied by penitence, however, affords no ground
for mitigation of judgment; and the kindliness with which Mr.
Darwin speaks of his assailant, Bishop Wilberforce (vol.ii.), is
so striking an exemplification of his singular gentleness and
modesty, that it rather increases one's indignation against the
presumption of his critic.) Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr.
Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a
shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable
production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most
cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or
any other age, is held up to scorn as a "flighty" person, who
endeavours "to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and
speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is
reprobated as "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science." And
all this high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in