M. General worry and botheration.  Ten or twelve people taking up my time all day about their own affairs.

N. O. P. Q. R. S. T. U. V. W. X. Y. Z.

Societies.

Clubs.

Dinners, evening parties, and all the apparatus for wasting time called “Society.”  Colensoism and botheration about Moses...Finally pestered to death in public and private because I am supposed to be what they call a “Darwinian.”

If that is not enough, I could exhaust the Greek alphabet for heads in addition.

I am glad to hear that Wyman thinks well of my book, as he is very competent to judge.  I hear it is republished in America, but I suppose I shall get nothing out of it. [In this expectation, however, he was agreeably disappointed by the action of D. Appleton and Company.

An undated letter to Kingsley, who had suggested that he should write an article on Prayer, belongs probably to the autumn of 1863:—­]

I should like very much to write such an article as you suggest, but I am very doubtful about undertaking it for “Fraser.”  Anything I could say would go to the root of praying altogether, for inasmuch as the whole universe is governed, so far as I can see, in the same way, and the moral world is as much governed by laws as the physical—­whatever militates against asking for one sort of blessing seems to me to tell with the same force against asking for any other.

Not that I mean for a moment to say that prayer is illogical, for if the whole universe is ruled by fixed laws it is just as logically absurd for me to ask you to answer this letter as to ask the Almighty to alter the weather.  The whole argument is an “old foe with a new face,” the freedom and necessity question over again.

If I were to write about the question I should have to develop all this side of the problem, and then having shown that logic, as always happens when it is carried to extremes, leaves us bombinantes in vacuo, I should appeal to experience to show that prayers of this sort are not answered, and to science to prove that if they were they would do a great deal of harm.

But you know this would never do for the atmosphere of “Fraser.”  It would be much better suited for an article in my favourite organ, the wicked “Westminster.”

However, to say truth, I do not see how I am to undertake anything fresh just at present.  I have promised an article for “Macmillan” ages ago; and Masson scowls at me whenever we meet.  I am afraid to go through the Albany lest Cook should demand certain reviews of books which have been long in my hands.  I am just completing a long memoir for the Linnean Society; a monograph on certain fossil reptiles must be finished before the new year.  My lectures have begun, and there is a certain “Manual” looming in the background.  And to crown all, these late events [the death of his brother] have given me such a wrench that I feel I must be prudent.