In justice to the Bishop, I am bound to say he bore no malice, but was always courtesy itself when we occasionally met in after years.  Hooker and I walked away from the meeting together, and I remember saying to him that this experience had changed my opinion as to the practical value of the art of public speaking, and that from that time forth I should carefully cultivate it, and try to leave off hating it.  I did the former, but never quite succeeded in the latter effort.

I did not mean to trouble you with such a long scrawl when I began about this piece of ancient history.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[In the evening there was a crowded conversazione in Dr. Daubney’s rooms, and here, continues the writer in “Macmillan’s,” “everyone was eager to congratulate the hero of the day.  I remember that some naive person wished ‘it could come over again’; Mr. Huxley, with the look on his face of the victor who feels the cost of victory, put us aside saying,] ‘Once in a lifetime is enough, if not too much.’”

[In a letter to me the same writer remarks—­

I gathered from Mr. Huxley’s look when I spoke to him at Dr. Daubeny’s that he was not quite satisfied to have been forced to take so personal a tone—­it a little jarred upon his fine taste.  But it was the Bishop who first struck the insolent note of personal attack.

Again, with reference to the state of feeling at the meeting:—­

I never saw such a display of fierce party spirit, the looks of bitter hatred which the audience bestowed—­(I mean the majority) on us who were on your father’s side—­as we passed through the crowd we felt that we were expected to say “how abominably the Bishop was treated”—­or to be considered outcasts and detestable.

It was very different, however, at Dr. Daubeny’s, “where,” says the writer of the account in “Darwin’s Life,” “the almost sole topic was the battle of the ‘Origin,’ and I was much struck with the fair and unprejudiced way in which the black coats and white cravats of Oxford discussed the question, and the frankness with which they offered their congratulations to the winners in the combat.”

The result of this encounter, though a check to the other side, cannot, of course, be represented as an immediate and complete triumph for evolutionary doctrine.  This was precluded by the character and temper of the audience, most of whom were less capable of being convinced by the arguments than shocked by the boldness of the retort, although, being gentlefolk, as Professor Farrar remarks, they were disposed to admit on reflection that the Bishop had erred on the score of taste and good manners.  Nevertheless, it was a noticeable feature of the occasion, Sir M. Foster tells me, that when Huxley rose he was received coldly, just a cheer of encouragement from his friends, the audience as a whole not joining in it.  But as he made his points the applause grew and widened, until, when he sat down, the cheering was not very much less than that given to the Bishop.  To that extent he carried an unwilling audience with him by the force of his speech.  The debate on the ape question, however, was continued elsewhere during the next two years, and the evidence was completed by the unanswerable demonstrations of Sir W.H.  Flower at the Cambridge meeting of the Association in 1862.