introduction, because it contains the core of Huxley's creed, and it explains the reason why he thought it necessary to keep on expounding that creed in lay sermon after lay sermon: "It is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game, infinitely more difficult and more complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated-without haste but without remorse." Longfellow once wrote in a notebook that "autobiography is what biography ought to be"; and although the filial piety of Mr. Leonard Huxley has given us the admirable volumes of his father's "Life and Letters," Huxley's outline of his own birth and upbringing and early career has an individuality and a self-revelatory quality which makes it invaluable for a full appreciation of the man himself. Especially does it show us Huxley's own estimate of himself—an estimate very like that which his friends and contemporaries had arrived at. It is rather an account of his own evolution than a record of the mere facts of his life; and if we wish to know more about him, about his many activities, about his contributions to science, about his writings, we must look elsewhere. All these things can be found in the ample biography for which we are indebted to his son. In the Appendix to the present volume there is a chronological table, which will enable the student to survey the seventy years of Huxley's life, one after another. This table supplies the dates of publication for all of Huxley's more important writings. It chronicles the posts that he held and the honors that came to him. And in a parallel column attention is called to other happenings of the three score years and ten between 1825 and 1895-years of high importance in the progress of mankind. Columbia University in the City of New York. BRANDER MATTHEWS [This outline sketch of his early life was written in 1889 when Huxley was sixty-four and when he had still six years to live. It omits to record his thirty years' service in various professorships and in important administrative positions. It does not note his voyage to the United States in 1876 nor his visits to the continent and to Egypt. It makes no mention of the failure of his health from overwork, which forced him, in 1885, to surrender his official posts and to leave London and settle in a house of his own at Eastbourne. Here he interested himself in gardening and in the revision of his scattered writings for a uniform edition. Freedom from care, and responsibility helped to improve his health; and in these years of retirement he found strength to write not a few of his most pungent essays. He retained his intellectual energy to the end; and he found life unfailingly interesting. So it was that he attained to the allotted threescore years and ten. He died at Eastbourne on June 29, 1895.] I AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND when I consider, in one view, the many things which I have upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being employed in this manner at my time of life. But, in another view, and taking in all circumstances, these things, as trifling as they may appear, no less than things of greater importance, seem to be put upon me to do. -Bishop Butler to the Duchess of Somerset. The "many things" to which the Duchess's correspondent here refers are the repairs and improvements of the episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if the great apologist, greater in nothing than in the simple dignity of his character, would have considered the writing an account of himself as a thing which could be put upon him to do whatever circumstances might be taken in. But the good bishop lived in an age when a man might write books and yet be permitted to keep his private existence to himself; in the pre-Boswellian epoch, when the germ of the photographer lay in the womb of the distant future, and the interviewer who pervades our |
