Nothing ever disgusted me more than being the subject of a battle with the Treasury over the Home Office appointment—­which I should have thrown up if I could have done so with decency to Harcourt.

It’s just as well for me I couldn’t, but it left a nasty taste.

I don’t want to leave the School, and should be very glad to remain as Dean, for many reasons.  But what I don’t see is how I am to do that and make my escape from the thousand and one entanglements—­which seem to me to come upon me quite irrespectively of any office I hold—­or how I am to go on living in London as a (financially) decayed philosopher.

I really see nothing for it but to take my pension and go and spend the winter of 1885-86 in Italy.  I hear one can be a regular swell there on 1000 pounds a year.

Six months’ absence is oblivion, and I shall take to a new line of work, and one which will greatly meet your approval.

As to X—­ I am not a-going to—­not being given to hopeless enterprises.  That rough customer at Dublin is the only man who occurs to me.  I can’t think of his name, but that is part of my general unfitness.

...I suppose I shall chaff somebody on my death-bed.  But I am out of heart to think of the end of the lunches in the sacred corner.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[On the 21st he writes home about the steps he had begun to take with respect to giving up part of his official work.]

I have had a long letter from Donnelly.  He had told Lord Carlingford of my plans, and encloses a letter from Lord Carlingford to him, trusting I will not hastily decide, and with some pretty phrases about “support and honour” I give to the School.  Donnelly is very anxious I should hold on to the School, if only as Dean, and wants me in any case to take two months’ holiday at Christmas.  Of course he looks on the Royal Society as the root of all evil.  Foster per contra looks on the School as the deuce, but would have me stick by the Royal Society like grim death.

The only moral obligation that weighs with me is that which I feel under, to deal fairly by Donnelly and the School.  You must not argue against this, as rightly or wrongly I am certain that if I deserted the School hastily, or if I did not do all that I can to requite Donnelly for the plucky way in which he has stood by it and me for the last dozen years, I should never shake off the feeling that I had behaved badly.  And as I am much given to brooding over my misdeeds, I don’t want you to increase the number of my hell-hounds.  You must help me in this...and if I am Quixotic, play Sancho for the nonce.

CHAPTER 2.16.

1884-1885.

[Towards the end of September he went to the West country to try to improve his health before the session began again in London.  Thus he writes, on September 26, to Mr. W.F.  Collier, who had invited him to Horrabridge, and on the 27th to Sir M. Foster:—­]