I have drawn the sword, but whether I am in truth to beat the giants and deliver my princess from the enchanted castle is yet to be seen.

[For several months he lived with his brother George and his wife at North Bank, St. John’s Wood (the house was pulled down in 1896 for the Great Central Railway), but the surroundings were too easy, and not conducive to hard work.]

I must, I fear, emigrate to some “two pair back,” which shall have the feel and manner of a workshop, where I can leave my books about and dissect a marine nastiness if I think fit, sallying forth to meet the world when necessary, and giving it no more time than necessary.  If it were not for a fear that P. would take it unkindly I should go at once.  I must summon up moral courage somehow (how difficult when it is to pain those we love!) and trust to her good sense for the rest.

[And later:—­]

...I have been very busy looking about for the last two days, and have been in fifty houses if I have been in one.  I want some place with a decent address, cheap, and beyond all things, clean.  The dirty holes that some of these lodgings are! such tawdry finery and such servants, with their faces and hands not merely dirty, but absolutely macadamised.  And they all make this confounded great Exhibition a plea for about doubling the rent.

[So in April 1851 he removed to lodgings hard by, at 1 Hanover Place, Clarence Gate, Regent’s Park] ("which sounds grand, but means nothing more than a sitting-room and bedroom in a small house"), [then to St. Anne’s Gardens, and after that to Upper York Place, while making a second home with his brother.  His other great friends already in London were the Fannings, who had left Australia a few months before his own return.  In the scientific world he soon made acquaintance with most of the leading men, and began a close friendship with Edward Forbes, with George Busk (then surgeon to H.M.S.  “Dreadnought” at Greenwich, afterwards President of the College of Surgeons) and his accomplished wife, and later in the year with both Hooker and Tyndall.  The Busks, indeed, showed him the greatest kindness throughout this period of struggle, and the sympathy and intellectual stimulus he received from their society were of the utmost help.  They were always ready to welcome him at Greenwich, and he not only often ran down there for a week-end, but would spend part of his vacations with them at Lowestoft or Tenby, where naturalists could find plenty of occupation.

But from a worldly point of view, it was too soon clear that science was sadly unprofitable.  There seemed no speedy prospect of making enough to marry on.  As early as March 1851 he writes:—­]