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 quarried, for the
sake partly of the literature, but still more of the philosophy. The
translation of "Wilhelm Meister," 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as he puts it in an unpublished autobiographical fragment.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 on September 29, 1840, it is continued for a couple of
years, and concludes with some vigorous annotations in 1845, when the
little booklet emerged from a three years' oblivion at the bottom of an
old desk. Early as this journal is, in it the boy displays three habits
afterwards characteristic of the man: the habit of noting down any
striking thought or saying he came across in the course of his reading;
of speculating on the causes of things and discussing the right and
wrong of existing institutions; and of making scientific experiments,
using them to correct his theories.

The first entry, the heading, as it were, and keynote of all the rest,
is a quotation from Novalis;--"Philosophy can bake no bread; but it can