Herein lay the secret of his lucidity.  Uniting the scientific habit of mind with the literary art, he showed that truthfulness need not be bald, and that power lies rather in accuracy than in luxuriance of diction.  As to the influence which such a style exerted on the habit of mind of his readers, there is remarkable testimony in a letter from Spedding, the editor of Bacon, printed in the Life of Huxley, ii, 239.  Spedding, his senior by a score of years, describes the influence of Bacon on his own style in the matter of exactitude, the pruning of fine epithets and sweeping statements, the reduction of numberless superlatives to positives, and asserts that if, as a young man, he had fallen in with Huxley’s writings before Bacon’s, they would have produced the same effect upon him.

Huxley’s own criticism of the one and only poem be ever published is also instructive.  On his way back from the funeral of Tennyson in Westminster Abbey, he spent the journey in shaping out some lines on the dead poet, the germ of which had come into his mind in the Abbey.  These, with a number of other tributes to Tennyson by professed poets, were printed in the Nineteenth Century for November, 1892.  He writes in a private letter:—­

    If I were to pass judgment upon it in comparison with the
    others, I should say that as to style it is hammered, and as
    to feeling, human.

They are castings of much prettier pattern and of mainly poetico-classical educated-class sentiment.  I do not think there is a line of mine one of my old working-class audience would have boggled over.

As regards the arts other than literary, he had a keen eye for a picture or a piece of sculpture, for, in addition to the draughtman’s and anatomist’s sense of form, he had a strong sense of colour.  To good music, also, he was always susceptible; as a young man he used to sing a little, but his voice, though true, was never strong.  In music, as in painting, he was untrained.  Yet, as has been noted already, his illustrations to MacGillivray’s Voyage of the Rattlesnake and his holiday sketches suggest that he might have gone far had he been trained as an artist.

When first married he used to set aside Saturday afternoons to take his wife to the Ella concerts, fore-runners of the “Saturday Pops.,” but it was not very long before the pressure of circumstance forbade this pleasure.  Later, he very occasionally managed to go to the theatre; but his chief recreation, apart from change of work and the rapid devouring of a good novel, was in meeting his friends, when occasion offered, at the scientific societies or at dinner, or now and then in country visits which had not yet received the name of “week-ends.”