[Thus he had been led to a settled disbelief in Bacon’s scientific greatness, that reasoned “prejudice” against which Spedding himself was moved to write twice in defence of Bacon.  In his first letter he criticised a passage in the lecture touching this question.  On the one hand, he remarks, “Bacon would probably have agreed with you as to his pretensions as a scientific discoverer (he calls himself a bellman to call other wits together, or a trumpeter, or a maker of bricks for others to build with).”  On the other hand, he asks, ought a passage from a fragment—­the “Temporis partus masculus”—­unpublished in Bacon’s lifetime, to be treated as one of his representative opinions?

In his second letter he adduces, on other grounds, his own more favourable impression of Bacon’s philosophical influence.  A peculiar interest of this letter lies in its testimony to the influence of Huxley’s writings even on his elder contemporaries.

From James Spedding.

February 1, 1878.

...When you admit that you study Bacon with a prejudice, you mean of course an unfavourable opinion previously formed on sufficient grounds.  Now I am myself supposed to have studied him with a prejudice the other way:  but this I cannot admit, in any sense of the word; for when I first made his acquaintance I had no opinion or feeling about him at all—­more than the ordinary expectation of a young man to find what he is told to look for.  My earliest impression of his character came probably from Thomson—­whose portrait of him, except as touched and softened by the tenderer hand of “the sweet-souled poet of the Seasons,” did not differ from the ordinary one.  It was not long indeed before I did begin to form an opinion of my own; one of those after-judgments which are liable to be mistaken for prejudices by those who judge differently, and which, being formed, do, no doubt, tell upon the balance.  For it was not long before I found myself indebted to him for the greatest benefit probably that any man, living or dead, can confer on another.  In my school and college days I had been betrayed by an ambition to excel in themes and declamations into the study, admiration, and imitation of the rhetoricians.  In the course of my last long vacation—­the autumn of 1830—­I was inspired with a new ambition, namely, to think justly about everything which I thought about at all, and to act accordingly; a conviction for which I cannot cease to feel grateful, and which I distinctly trace to the accident of having in the beginning of that same vacation given two shillings at a second-hand bookstall for a little volume of Dove’s classics, containing the Advancement of Learning.  And if I could tell you how many superlatives I have since that time degraded into the positive; how many innumerables and infinities I have replaced by counted numbers and estimated quantities; how many assumptions, important to the argument in hand, I have withdrawn because I