“But it will be said that I forget the beauty and the human interest, which appertain to classical studies.  To this I reply that it is only a very strong man who can appreciate the charms of landscape as he is toiling up a steep hill, along a bad road.  What with short-windedness, stones, nits, and a pervading sense of the wisdom of rest and be thankful, most of us have little enough sense of the beautiful under these circumstances.  The ordinary schoolboy is precisely in this case.  He finds Parnassus uncommonly steep, and there is no chance of his having much time or inclination to look about him till he gets to the top.  And nine times out of ten he does not get to the top.”

The last example we shall take comes from a speech made after dinner at a much later period of his life.  The occasion was a complimentary dinner to the editor of the English scientific periodical Nature, which had been for long the leading semi-popular journal of English science.  Huxley, in proposing the health of the editor, declared that he did not quite know how to say what he wanted to say, but that he would explain by a story.

“A poor woman,” he said, “was brought into one of our hospitals in a shockingly battered condition.  When her wounds had been cleaned and sewn, and when the care of the surgeons had restored her to comparative comfort, someone said to her, ’I am afraid your husband has been knocking you about.’  ‘What!’ she said, ’my Jim bash me? no it worn’t by him; he’s always been more like a friend to me than a husband.’  That,” went on Huxley, “is what I wish to say about our guest of to-night.  In all our intercourse with him he has been more like a friend to us than an editor.”

It is impossible to make a real distinction between the essays and the addresses of Huxley.  Many of the most important of his addresses, as for instance his Romanes lecture on “Evolution and Ethics,” were written and printed before he delivered them; most of them were carefully prepared, and revised and printed after delivery.  It is therefore not remarkable to find a close resemblance in matter and manner between what was originally spoken and what was published without a viva voce delivery.  Everything that may be said of the one set applies with an equal fitness to the other set.  There are many who assert with confidence that Huxley is one of the great masters of English, and although an examination of this opinion involves discussion of the elusive quality termed “style,” it is necessary to attempt it.

In that totality which consists of an essay or of a printed address, and of which we are, most of us, ready to discuss the style, there are at least three separable elements, each contributing after its kind to the effect on our minds.  When the general effect is to throw us into a state of pleasure, it is our habit to qualify the style with an adjective of praise, selecting the adjective according to the