At last the gleams of promise, which had begun to gather, broke through the clouds.  On the sudden death of Professor Jamieson, his good friend Edward Forbes was called away in the spring of 1854 to take the Edinburgh professorship.  At a few days’ notice Huxley was lecturing as Forbes’s substitute at the Royal School of Mines.  In July he was appointed permanently, with a salary for his course of L100 a year.  A few days later his income was doubled.  Forbes had held two lectureships; the man who had accepted the other drew back, and it was given to Huxley.  In August he was “entrusted with the Coast Survey Investigations under the Geological Survey,” becoming the regular Naturalist to the Survey the following year, with pay of L200, afterwards increased to L400, rising to L600.  The way was clear; the Heathorn family had already determined to come home.  Miss Heathorn had been very ill; she was still far from strong, and, indeed, one gloomy doctor only gave her six months to live.  The lover defied him:  “I shall marry her all the same;” but the gloomy doctor was alone in his opinion, and, indeed, she lived till she was nearly eighty-nine.  The marriage, which was to bring so much active happiness in a life of much struggle and stress, was celebrated on July 1, 1855.  They had become engaged at twenty-two; they had waited and striven for eight years; they were rewarded by forty years of mutual love and support.

V

LEHRJAHRE

The award of the Royal Medal was felt by Huxley to be a turning-point.  It was something which convinced the “practical” people who used to scoff at his “dreamy” notions, and brought them to urge him on a more “dreamy” course than ever he dreamed of.  “However,” he remarks, “I take very much my own course now, even as I have done before—­Huxley all over.”  Without being blinded by any vanity, he saw in the award and the general estimate in which it was held a finger-post showing as clearly as anything can what was the true career lying open before him.  Ambitious in the current sense of worldly success he was not.  The praise of men stirred a haunting mistrust of their judgment and his own worthiness.  Honours he valued as evidences of power; but no more.  What possessed him was, as he confessed in a letter meant only for the eye of his future wife, “an enormous longing after the highest and best in all shapes—­a longing which haunts me and is the demon which ever impels me to work, and will let me have no rest unless I am doing his behests.”  With the sense of power stirring within him, he refused to be beholden to any man.  Patronage he abhorred in an ago of patronage.  He was ready to accept a helping hand from any one who thought him capable of forwarding the great cause in ever so small a way; but on no other terms.  If the time had come to speak out on any matter, he was resolved to let no merely personal influence restrain him.  He cared only for the praise or blame of