tions on South America, and he was all the time making enormous accumulations of fact subsidiary to his great design. In July 1858 he communicated to the Linnæan Society some of his discoveries, and in November 1859 he published at last his famous Origin of Specics. The book immediately awakened a storm of controversy, which spread to all the intellectual centres of Europe. The new theory was violently attacked and defended at the British Association of 1860; among its earliest supporters were Lyell and Hooker, Huxley and Wallace. Unobservant of the storm which raged around his name, Darwin busied himself for twelve more Charles Darwin After the Portrait by the Hon. John Collier years in the work of collecting further and fuller proofs of his development theory. But meanwhile had appeared The Fertilisation of Orchids in 1862, and The Variation of Animals and Plants in 1867, learned instalments of the vast work on instances of natural selection which he afterwards thought it needless to conclude. The reception of The Descent of Man, in 1871, in which Darwin summed up the results of his doctrine of the ancestry of man being common with that of less-developed animals, was far more temperate than might have been expected, for popular opinion had greatly advanced since the wild fanatic days of The Origin of Species. In 1872 Darwin published a large volume on The Expression of the Emotions, and in 1875 his Insectivorous Plants. These and successive treatises, some of them bulky, may all be considered as appendices to, or extended paragraphs of, The Origin of Species, embroideries on what Darwin treated as the rough framework of his great theory of natural selection. Of his later monographs the one which attracted most popular attention was that on The Formation of Vegetable Mould by Earthworms, 1881. Ceaseless labour had now, however, broken down a constitution which was never strong, and on the 18th of April 1882, after a short but very painful illness, he died at Down. Darwin was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey, the pall being carried by the most eminent survivors among Englishmen of science. The character of Charles Darwin was singularly winning; of the most unaffected modesty, he was the last to consider his own deserts or believe that he was famous. He lived the life of a valetudinarian country gentleman, in the midst of a devoted family, constantly but quietly engaged in his researches. His kindness towards younger men was unremitting, and many even of those who never saw his face loved him like a father." FROM "THE FERTILISATION OF ORCHIDS." The importance of the science of Homology rests on its giving us the key-note of the possible amount of difference in plan within any group; it allows us to class under proper heads the most diversified organs; it shows us gradations which would otherwise have been overlooked, and thus aids us in our classification; it explains many monstrosities; it leads to the detection of obscure and hidden parts, or mere vestiges of parts, and shows us the meaning of rudiments. Besides these practical uses, to the naturalist who believes in the gradual modification of organic beings, the science of Homology clears away the mist from such terms as the scheme of nature, ideal types, archetypal patterns or ideas, &c., for these terms come to express real facts. The naturalist, thus guided, sees that all homologous parts or organs. however much diversified, are modifications of one and the same ancestral organ; in tracing existing gradations he gains a clue in tracing, as far as that is possible, the probable course of modification during a long line of generations. He may feel assured that, whether he follows embryological development, or searches for the merest rudiments, or traces gradations between the most different beings, he is pursuing the same object by different routes, and is tending towards the knowledge of the actual progenitor of the group, as it once grew and lived. Thus the subject of Homology gains largely in interest. CHAPTER IV THE AGE OF TENNYSON 1870-1900 later years THE record of half a century of poetic work performed by ALFRED TENNY- Tennyson in SON between 1842, when he took his position as the leading poet after Wordsworth, and 1892, when he died, is one of unequalled persistency and sustained evenness of flight. If Shakespeare had continued to write on into the Commonwealth, or if Goldsmith had survived to welcome the publication of Sense and Sensibility, these might have been parallel cases. The force of Tennyson was twofold: he did not yield his pre-eminence before any younger writer to the very last, and he preserved a singular uniformity in public taste in poetry by the tact with which he produced his contributions at welcome moments, not too often, nor too irregularly, nor so fantastically as to endanger his hold on the popular suffrage. He suffered no perceptible mental decay, even in the extremity of age, and on his deathbed, in his eighty-fourth year, composed a lyric as perfect in its technical delicacy of form as any which he had written in his prime. Tennyson, therefore, was a power of a static species: he was able, by the vigour and uniformity of his gifts, to hold English poetry stationary for sixty years, a feat absolutely unparalleled elsewhere; and the result of various revolutionary movements in prosody and style made during the Victorian age was merely in every case temporary. There was an explosion, the smoke rolled away, and Tennyson's statue stood exactly where it did before. In this pacific and triumphant career certain critical moments may be mentioned. In each of his principal writings Tennyson loved to sum up a movement of popular speculation. In 1847 feminine education was in the air, and the poet published his serio-comic or sentimentalist-satiric educational narrative of the Princess, the most artificial of his works, a piece of long-drawn exquisite marivaudage in the most softly gorgeous blank verse. In 1850, by inevitable selection, Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth as Laureate, and published anonymously the monumental elegy of In Memoriam. This poem had been repeatedly taken up since the death, seventeen years before, of its accomplished and beloved subject, Arthur Hallam. As it finally appeared, the anguish of bereavement was toned down by time, and an atmosphere of philosophic resignation tempered the whole. What began in a spasmodic record of memories and intolerable regret, closed in a confession of faith and a repudiation of the right to despair. The skill of Tennyson enabled him to conceal this irregular and fragmentary construction; but In Memoriam remains a disjointed edifice, with exquisitely carved chambers and echoing corridors that lead to nothing. It introduced into general recognition a metrical form, perhaps invented by Ben Jonson, at once so simple and so salient, that few since Tennyson have ventured to repeat it, in spite of his extreme success. The Crimean War deeply stirred the nature of Tennyson, and his agitations are reflected in the most feverish and irregular of all his principal compositions, the Maud of 1855. This volume contains ample evidence of a hectic condition of feeling. It is strangely experimental; in it the poet passes on occasion further from the classical standards of style than anywhere else, and yet he rises here and there into a rose-flushed ecstasy of plastic beauty that reminds us of what the statue must have seemed a moment after the breath of the Goddess inflamed it. The volume of 1855 is an epitome of all Tennyson in quintessence-the sumptuous, the simple, the artificial, the eccentric qualities are here; the passionately and brilliantly uplifted, the morbidly and caustically harsh moods find alternate expression; the notes of nightingale and night-jar are detected in the strange antiphonies of this infinitely varied collection. For the remainder of his long life Tennyson concentrated his talents mainly on one or two themes or classes of work. He desired to excel in epic narrative and in the drama. It will be found that most of his exertions in these last five-and-twenty years took this direction. From his early youth he had nourished the design of accomplishing that task which so many of the great poets of England had vainly desired to carry out, namely, the celebration of the national exploits of King Arthur. In 1859 the first instalment of Idylls of the King was, after many tentative experiments, fairly placed before the public, and in 1872 the series closed. In 1875 Tennyson issued his first drama, Queen Mary; and in spite of the opposition of critical opinion, on the stage and off it, he persisted in the successive production of six highly elaborated versified plays, of which, at length, one, Becket, proved a practical success on the boards. That the enforced issue of these somewhat unwelcome dramas lessened the poet's hold over the public was obvious, and almost any other man in his seventysixth year would have acquiesced. But the artistic energy of Tennyson was unconquerable, and with a juvenile gusto and a marvellous combination. of politic tact and artistic passion the aged poet called the public back to him with the four irresistible volumes of ballads, idyls, songs, and narratives of which the Tiresias of 1885 was the first, and the Death of Enone of 1892 the fourth. It would be idle to pretend that the enchanting colours were not a little faded, the romantic music slightly dulled, in these last accomplishments; yet, if they showed something of the wear and tear of years, they were no "dotages," to use Dryden's phrase, but the characteristic and |